Tag: Public Relations

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Culture Internet Culture

Day 1902 and Cynical Victories for Hollow Lies

I know it’s sweet bordering on stupid to engage in good faith when it comes to politics, but maybe I’ve grown soft in my old age. I really do believe that Americans are capable of building wide coalitions in a pluralistic society.

Call me naive but most Americans, even most humans, have more to bind us together than to break as apart. We are social animals even the most introverted of us.

So I hate seeing groups who share common values fall apart over schismatic propaganda pieced together explicitly to worsen your weaknesses and widen your vulnerabilities till you are both tied to horrors you’d never have condoned.

The trouble with Utilitarians is they say up front that the ends justify the means. Thats your starting baseline. Which is at least clean. Then the Machiavellian’s say it’s alright to obfuscate. The noble lie and all. And then suddenly the enemy is inside your gates and you are being gutted.

This is roughly what is occurring between Bannon-world who hates technology so much they have accidentally teamed up with a gaggle of one world government rationalists to…use zoning rules to save the world from…industrial parks with rack servers?

I know it doesn’t sound very sinister but everyone involved is sure the anti-Christ is going to be involved. Peter Thiel is in Rome giving lectures so the buggy man has involved.

Folks must enjoy being useful idiots as it’s strange to me to think you might align with people you loathe just to fuck up the other team. The goal is flourishing for all no? You came at me and my boys for whom all I wish is flourishing.

Which is funny as I was always under the impression that end times eschatology required the Antichrist to be quite well liked. Everyone involved in this is universally despised.

I guess if you are certain that you are in danger of being stomped out by an evil, and believe any of your actions are justified by this premise, you may as well embrace all kinds of evil.

But you do have the options of not using millenarian tactics to scare the shire. Hobbits are brave or so said the neomonarchist who can’t tweet. But I won’t forget people who threw me over for propaganda they were too dim to understand or cynical enough to believe no one else would.

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Chronic Disease Culture Politics Preparedness

Day 1901 and Burying Ehrlich

For as much time as I spend kvetching about my own petty problems (and I know that it is a not insubstantial amount of time), I am what my husband calls a macro optimist.

This is somewhat in contrast to him, who is on a day-to-day basis, a micro optimist but doesn’t quite see the long-term horizon as positively as I do.

Different temperaments are a good thing when it comes to balancing outlooks and outcomes. This is arguably why we are a good team and have managed to stay married for a decade.

I look out for the macro level future and optimize for it being successful and he optimizes the day-to-day, making sure that the micro level is successful.

I titled this post “Burying Ehrlich” because Paul Ehrlich passed away at the age of 93 last Friday. You might know him as the co-author of the 1968 best seller Population Bomb.

An entomologist by training, his book jumped to much bigger claims saying Earth faced imminent mass starvation urging governments to reduce population. That has not so far proven to be true. Even now the New York Times obituary said his claims were premature. We just love an impending disaster.

It’s a cruel historical irony that a man who wrote his thesis on butterflies would end up having such an enormous butterfly effect on the number of human beings being born. His neo-Malthusian insights were a huge hit.

And unfortunately we will experience the consequences of his public intellectual adventurism. We will have fewer humans and the famine he predicted never materialized. And now if we have more troubles facing us, we have far fewer humans able to take up the task of finding the solutions we will need.

Maybe if he had been a little bit more of a macro-level optimist, he would have been able to see what I see everyday. Despite daily travails due to my chronic disease, I see the micro-optimism of humans like my husband every single day. While I can’t always be positive every day, I remain positive that together we can find a way to improve on yesterday.

Humans are incredible at finding a way around life’s intractable problems. We produce little innovations, little inventions, little tweaks and little solutions. And they add up.

We are social animals whose evolutionary pressures seem to have yielded a culture of engineering. These little fixes we constantly produce when added up together have made for major improvements.

We even occasionally see extraordinary catalysts that allow us to go much faster with our improvements. We’ve had a number of revolutions, industrial and otherwise. Indeed the last 50 years or so have shown the Malthusian fears of food production to be histrionic in comparison to the progress we’ve made.

We have fed the planet but we will never get back the babies who were not born either because of China’s one-child policy or simple cultural attitude acceptance that one or two children should be enough. In my generation it may end up being more common to not have children at all.

Now it may seem rich that someone who goes in for quite a bit of preparedness should speak against a man who saw the value of taking action in the face of what he saw as long odds.

But next time someone tells you that the end is near and all is lost, remember that Paul didn’t end up being correct in any of his assumptions.

Not because at the time it was so crazy to think we weren’t producing enough food, but because he couldn’t conceive of a world in which we were able to solve our problem.

So I pray as his family buries him that we as a species can remember to bury some of our own alarmism. Our job is to keep on going in the face of long odds, just as every one of our ancestors has done before us.

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Politics Preparedness Startups

Day 1887 and Trust Me Bro

I don’t feel terrific so I’ll keep this as a ramble but with some links. I fear some sort of Rubicon has was crossed, which we will only recognize in hindsight, in the fight for property rights in America versus the tyranny of failing state capacity.

I am referring to the contract dispute between foundation model developer Anthropic and American Secretary of War Hegseth that boiled over on Friday night as some sort of Murderbot surveillance subplot parsed only by lawyers, policy wonks and anyone who remembers the patriotism of Chelsea Manning.

Right before America and Israel went all Epic Fury on Iran over the weekend, somehow it was felt a messy public fight between defense contractor and the civilian oversight of our military was ok? Good thing everyone is too distracted to care.

Funny how one can go from cheering on our military’s capacity for innovation one week and the next to be waving one’s arms screaming “no oh no no no” but that’s just politics as run by the instincts of reality television I suppose.

The best writing on this so far has been Dean Ball (who worked in this Trump administration on its AI position statement not so long ago) who feels that Hegseth took an approach on renegotiating a contract with a frontier AI model developer that has consequences.

Loosely and I am missing much Anthropic had its previous contract to parse classified documents in the Department of Defense (now the Department of War) negotiated by the prior administration. Some aspects of this contract wasn’t going to work for the Trump administration. Anthropic didn’t want to change it and Hegseth threatened to call Anthropic a supply chain risk unless it complied. They didn’t and Sam Altman signed a deal.

Wrapped up in this is that of course we all eventually comply with Leviathan who has the monopoly on violence. I don’t claim any expertise here but lots of people understand defense contractor law.

On its face Anthropic looks like the moral high ground and the position all capitalists and private property respected would prefer. However, it’s in Dean’s words, a bit weird for a company to tell the state that a private corporation has a say in policy as opposed to our democratic institutions.

Anthropic is essentially using the contractual vehicle to impose what feel less like technical constraints and more like policy constraints on the military

This is all complicated by the model developer having wishes for frontier AI development to be nationalized and for their work in particular to be safeguarded by a different political administration. It has become a right versus left thing as it was bound to do.

Now Anthropic gets to enjoy the full throated defense of its industry peers and even conservative policy makers like Dean, because our current state capacity is not what I’d call excellent when it comes to our civilian government capacity. Honestly our military still seems to be crushing it.

Secretary Hegseth looked a bit like he was over reaching in his command that he get his demands met. Americans are very touchy about surveillance of if’s citizens and much less touchy about autonomous weapons so it’s natural to be a bit suspicious if you are a millennial who remembers the Global War on Terror. If you are Zoomer who doesn’t know who Chelsea Manning is please go ask Claude.

However it’s not at all clear that Hegseth’s original negotiations were out of hand as of course it’s the state who decides legal use not the private company and we are meant to have laws, judicial process and all the rest. It’s just that we don’t. So what on earth do we do about it? Trust me bro is not a policy.

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Emotional Work Media

Day 1859 and Crime Without Punishment

People tell stories of where they were or what they were doing when major world events happened. Most of them are silly and personal but necessary to ground the horrors of being connected at scale while still being such small bit players in the scale of things.

On 9/12 I had just left New York City to return home to Colorado to finish out the high school I’d dropped out of the year prior. My grandmother called me at dawn before I’d left for the annual start of school camping trip, distraught that we couldn’t reach cousins and other family who were first responders or worked downtown. Then we couldn’t get through for hours.

When Lady Diana was killed I was up early for a sports competition preparing my gear when the news broke. My mother and I watched in shock at 4 in the morning as we packed bags.

When Michael Jackson died I was in Miami on my first solo vacation between jobs having sublet a condo for two weeks while I sublet my New York apartment. The grocery clerk at Publix ringing me up asked if I had heard. I attempted to explain that I’d seen it on something called Twitter.

When Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself I was in the hospital. I had been entirely off social media but still listened to the five minute radio news update. I don’t know why but I told my doctor that he was dead and her immediate response was to swear. I recall us both being upset as she shook her head saying “now he will never face justice.”

The entire weekend was a deluge of people processing, concocting, and turning over the “flood the zone with shit” dump of files on Epstein. As if the Friday night “take out the trash” media playbook somehow still held sway over a population of networked humans.

Now we are a species who remember every Harry and tragedy both personally in the context of our own small lives and at large as it emerges into a wider understanding shaped by the contours of those who seek to distract or draw attention.

It’s no wonder we spellbound by conspiracies. I lived across from ground zero for years. Tourists grieved and paid homage next to soap box schizophrenia weaving tales. I grew up on forums dissecting every aspect of death and tragedy from princesses to the King of Pop. Why should the coverage of depraved sins be any different?

So I ask myself why should I believe any of it. Who should I give information dumps and theory threads and newspaper headlines any attention at all? I’ll never know if crimes were punished. Justice works slowly and sometimes not at all.

Categories
Media Reading

Day 1855 and Reading The Certain Uncertainty

My daily routine starts perceptually early when I am in Europe and perceptually late when I am in Montana. The world is currently rotating on the narratives of American Eastern Standard Time and that means I try to rotate with it too.

Alas part of me has always oriented my circadian rhythm around the full noon day sun as I’m I am not an early bird nor a night owl. So European hours work better for me than Mountain West Hours for some types of work.

Most notably the watching of flows of information, particularly from legacy media and its keepers in Washington DC and New York City.

I don’t know where I got the habit, probably from my mother or father, but I always start my day scanning the major newspapers.

There is functionally no local paper to read any longer in most markets but I will take Bloomberg, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, along with NPR before I do anything else. If I’m feeling spicy I might even look through the New York Post.

It’s a habit I was encouraged into as my family was a household that always had a newspaper delivered. Whoever began their day together would share or sections, like a Norman Rockwell painting. I generally remember it being my mother but my father was a great reader as well.

What began with a local Colorado paper turned into many subscriptions. We subscribed to all sorts of magazines and periodicals when times were good and what we could not justify in the household budget, I was encouraged to pick up at the library after school.

Maybe this is why I am such an avid writer, as I am an avid reader. Although I don’t know if either of those habits will have much utility in the future as we transit into visual and oral communication methods. I am still reticent to scroll video platforms.

Now I begin the day not just with a newspaper scan but with every sources of information I can scan from commodity indexes to podcasts and social media.

I like to know where the discourse is being guided as early as I can. Obviously in my professional capacity sometimes I’m months ahead or even years, but I like to be ahead, at least, of the day’s news as well.

Increasingly it is hard to be sure that you are able to paint yourself a picture of what may really be happening as opposed to a picture of what somebody else would like you to think is happening. This was always true but now we are in the fog of war.

Hence my interest in being on European time zones. I can usually get a good grip on what may percolate up being ahead of the London broadsheets. Being just ahead enough of the largest media market (American media is mostly based in Manhattan) can give you a real sense of freedom in these very certain, uncertain times.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1854 and Will The Real Fake Fendi Please Stand Up?

I don’t know if I should be flattered or irritated but I learned funniest thing this week. Netflix “stole” my Real Fake Fendi story for their hit show Emily in Paris. Let me explain.

Emily in Paris wrote a plot-line into the current 5th season which appears to be riffing on one of my old blogposts “The Real Fake Fendi.” It is a true story & anyone who has known me awhile has heard me tell it.

I wrote about it in ‘21 on this blog five years long before this season premiered. I am on day 1853 day of writing a daily blog and published the story on Day 89 of my writing experiment though the actual experience took place sometime in the late aughts or early teens where I believe I first wrote about it on an old blog I took down.

Emily pitches a campaign to Fendi for a “real fake Fendi” on Emily in Paris

I suspect I would find earlier variants of this tale from my very first (somewhat popular) fashion blog as well. I suppose where fashion is headed is always where fashion has been. Or as they say on the show “it’s super meta and self referential”

The story goes like this. I was once was asked by a tourist for directions to find “a real fake Fendi” when I lived in Manhattan’s Chinatown.

I was honestly stumped by this inquiry. I didn’t answer immediately as my mind raced through the implications of their request. Imagine my mind retrieving.

Was there a fake that had inherent realness that other knockoffs did not possess? Was there a vendor who sold the most authentic mimicry of Fendi which the tourist wished to find? I had no clue how to answer.

Did they mean the realness one sees on the catwalks overseen by RuPaul? But which kind of realness? The creation that evokes the spirit of its inspiration? A realness so over the top and yet absolutely true to its essence?

Or perhaps the blunt direct feedback from being “read” by a drag artist that no construct, no matter how convincing, is the original artifact. Is is serving realness? I honestly didn’t know. I had Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction swirling in my head and still has no answer.

Apparently tourists looking for Canal Street want to buy the most authentic real fake Fendi

I just told the tourist that Canal was one block north and walked away. I don’t know if they ever found what they were looking for and I may have even given them the wrong directions I was so flummoxed.

Now can I really complain about someone taking one of my coinages and injecting it into a Darren Starr show about spunky brunette girl from heartland American who becomes a luxury fashion marketer by being good at social media. You see where I am going with this. That girl is me.

Perhaps my friend and fashion scholar Susan Scafidi of Fordham Law School’s Fashion Law Institute & author of “Who Owns Culture” would know who owns this cultural artifact. I bet I’ve told her this story too.

This life story archetype has been aspirational long before me. Murphy Brown anyone? It has been done in many different formats including Darren Starr’s best known work Sex and The City.

But it is my story too. So is Emily in Paris the real story of Julie in Manhattan? Is Julie in Manhattan the real Emily in Paris? Am I a retro causal multiverse prequel version of Emily?

Who is the real Emily? Am I the real Emily? Who buys a fake version of the real thing? Either way, I think Netflix owes me at a walk on spot. It would be very self referential. Or me-referential

Categories
Politics Travel

Day 1838 and Tractor Protests of the Mercosur Free Trade Deal In Greece

As I continued my journey through southern Europe yesterday, I encountered one of the most striking protests I’ve ever seen. At every major intersection and city limit there were hundreds (if not thousands in instance) of tractors lining the streets.

From enormous modern combines to Jeremy Clarkson style esoteric speciality vehicles, I saw more tractors yesterday than I think I’ve seen in my entire life. It was majestic. And it continued for my entire drive through the country from border to port to border.

Mind you I drove a tractor before I drove a car, and I live in farm country so trips to the local John Deere dealership are a monthly ritual for us. And I’ve never seen such a variety of tractors. It made quite the spectacle and was deeply emotional seeing so many of them empty and lined up in a row in quiet dissent.

Crossing an intersection over Greek Farmers protesting the Mercosur trade deal

The tractors flew flags and banners indicating their disapproval of the signing of the EU-Mercosur Trade Deal. The European Union will be trading with the Mercosur bloc consisting of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay. It is set to create the world’s largest free-trade area covering 700 million people. 

European farmers are not happy about it. Yet the protestors did not disrupt traffic at all. The roads were open and passable. A blessing given that in many areas it either snowing or had recently snowed and the temperatures were below zero.

Mediterranean olive land covered in snow on January 11th.

The snow is not a very common experience for an area that farms olives and grain. And yet on top of changing weather patterns, the Greek farmers I saw protesting (along with 27 other European countries who are signatories) must now contend with farmers in 4 Latin American countries that do not have their standards or rules.

Economic collaboration and global ties were touted in all the press from Brussels as they condemned America’s retreat from trade. And the part of me that is a committed free trader wanted to agree. But the part of me that struggles with illness and the American food system was on their side.

And yet Europe is saying damn their own farmer’s opinions, stick it to America and our government’s trade wars. Ursula von der Leyen will let in Brazilian fruit and glyphosate saturated grains come to Europe.

I am no stranger to protest movements from the Battle of Seattle to EarthFirst! I picked up Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals as a child. I remember the era where organizations like the WTO were criticized and concerns about trade and agriculture were front and center. We forgot along the way and the politics went horseshoe theory but the problems remained.

I don’t farm or ranch, merely keep chickens, garden and maintain our land in Montana, but my husband’s beloved electronic free Deere is practically a family member. We are sympathetic to farmers and care about topics like soil earth, permaculture and the endless glyphosate lawsuits.

I’d rather America be trading with Europe than Europe be trading with Latin American countries. The land some of them work is meant to be rainforest not grain fields.

I’d be furious too if I were a Greek, Irish or French farmer under restrictions my competitors didn’t face knowing that they produced a better product on land cared for under high standards and almost impossible conditions. They know what they yield is destined to move on their ports somewhere. Thats what their ports do. But protest they must.

The Thesolonikki Port as seen from a hotel

And yet here the farmers were, placing their precious equipment on the roads silently condemning the entire lot of politicians who care neither for the people or the land.

Seeing like a state means we are just numbers to them. I couldn’t count all the tractors I saw. There were too many. At every crossing I saw there were more. And that’s the point. It will affect all of us in the local and global balance of the land and the people it feeds.

The land and its stewards ultimately don’t matter where no matter what Brussels says. Neither does America’s politicians and their economic foibles. It’s all a numbers game.

So the farmers showed them their numbers every where I turned. I noticed them. And I hope others do too. What we can do is not for me to say. I see them and am sharing so you can too.

A gas station stop in the middle of nowhere
Categories
Politics

Day 1828 and Collective Warmth

I feel lucky to have acquired an education that taught enough of totalitarian history that I feel I can paraphrase Walter Benjamin.

I’d used to say well we all know “fascism is the aestheticization of politics” because academics helped me to be skeptical about theory and Marxism.

Benjamin saw the logical result of fascism is to introduce aesthetics into political life. A hundred years later we have cultural war politics to serve as spectacle instead of transforming material conditions.

So I’m exactly the sort of person who came to the end of Gramsci’s Long March and wanted to understand Frankfurt School academics viscerally. I like to be on the ground when I learn.

So I am horrified to have spent my New Year’s in Sarajevo only to see a socialist taking on the mayoralty of America’s most important financial center.

To go from seeing the history of a hundred years of European continental war to watching bratty millennial nepotism play act at collective action is frankly not a positive development.

Millions of Europeans did battle with communism and in America we are so coddled the swearing in ceremony of New York City’s democratic socialist mayor is celebrated.

“We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. – Mayor Zohran Mamdani Inaugural Address

If misery loves company then we should all suffer equally is a less aesthetic way of saying we are all in it together. Or as Sebastian Junger said “It was better when it was bad”

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Media

Day 1811 and Flakkity Flak

Maybe because the profession’s entire raison d’être is to engage you there is always a new name for people who are good at grabbing your attention.

I swear I’ve lived through half a dozen new names for the communications profession in twenty years of being paid, in one form or another, to get attention for other people. And I don’t even call myself a marketer.

Everyone on LinkedIn, and a few on Twitter have latched onto the latest buzzword: storyteller. Someone call Joseph Campbell and see if they can send him a residuals check beyond the grave.

The aversion to existing terms like marketing, communications, and public relations is endemic to the space. There is always the new hotness and thus always a new name. Crisis manager. Influencer. Honestly I miss socialite. That was a great term.

I had not intended to read the trend piece as it’s not news to me that we hire professionals to craft stories about brands and people.

Millennials were the original generation who experienced personal brand building as just one of those things required to get a job.

I am glad I opened it up though as I got to experience a pretty amusing bit of story telling inside the Wall Street Journals mobile application. A most unfortunate creative services choice to place storytelling sponsored content from consulting firm Deloitte.

Who knew that consulting firms final form would be not as management consultants but publicists? The remaining few journalists at the Wall Street Journal definitely were not involved in this.

Categories
Aesthetics Media

Day 1802 and Very Julian Fellowes Coded

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.

I keep reading editorials about what the artificial intelligence boom most resembles. This week it’s railway booms and busts and the fortunes made and most. We’ve got dueling mandates for skepticism and boosterism.

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.