Tag: Public Relations

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Internet Culture Politics

Day 1272 and GWOT

As an elder millennial fascinated by the mass media I have a lot of mixed feelings on the American government and how it waged the “war on terror.”

It is heavy on my mind with the current news of Julien Assange’s agreement with the American government.

I think a lot about media, and in particular the technology that powers media. An informed population can still act in its own best interests but what we get told affects what we perceive as our best interests. And as we become more informed naturally some skepticism of the intentions of power arise.

Media affects how nation states wage wars. As we’ve evolved from print to television to radio to the internet how we sell the costs of war changed. But there are always populations who pay enough attention to be skeptical.

The open internet was born of that skepticism of government even so much of the technology emerged thanks to America’s heavy investment in defense industries.

Scientists used to have a wide range of politics and it’s not a surprise that defending American interests is a popular idea amongst people who work for the government. But maybe you see things and fight for more accountability along the way.

The GWOT unevenly affected millennials. If you were middle class your kid probably didn’t join up unless being in the service was how you got to being middle class. There was no draft.

Being in Colorado I had exposure to folks who worked for defense contractors as a lot of the private sector had settled around the cluster of talent from Boulder’s science labs down to the Air Force Academy in Fort Collins.

But there has been skepticism in all the branches of government as it became harder to control the narratives. And Americans don’t particularly like the idea of having propaganda even though I’d argue we produce and consumer enormous quantities of it as a nation.

I wish I could be more cogent about any of this. I am regularly shocked by how little people seem to remember how we prosecuted these long wars. We quickly forget.

Don’t be too sure human nature had changed. Don’t be too keen to give the government power because you are afraid. We’ve already seen what they do with it.

Categories
Media

Day 1235 and Spin Doctors

Anytime I am outside of the bubble of American media algorithms, I feel like I see more clearly. It’s easier to spot “spin” when you see multiple narratives from competing supranational actors. When I’m in Europe, it’s much easier to see competing angles from Russia, China, and competing industrial interests.

The term “spin doctor” emerged during the Reagan-Mondale debates in the 1984 election.

A spin doctor is a person, typically a political aide or publicist, whose role is to present information or events in a way that favors a particular perspective or interpretation. Their goal is to influence public opinion by putting a favorable “spin” on the narrative.

It combines the meanings of “spin” (a biased interpretation or slant) and “doctor” (someone who repairs or fine-tunes things). Spin doctors aim to control the media’s portrayal of events by providing their own analysis and framing the story in a way that benefits their side.

Perplexity’s “Spin Doctor”

I’ve not heard “spin doctor” used recently even as we’ve gone further into cultural obsessions with media and its role in shaping opinion across the Internet age.

We’ve never had more awareness of how the news sausage gets made and it only drives interest. Filter bubbles are now written up in listicles. Publicists are the subject of profile treatments their clients typically receive.

We are in the golden age of propaganda and every single one of us competes in shifting alliances of attention and affiliation. We are all spin doctors now for our causes.

Categories
Media

Day 1186 and Return To Non-Normalcy

I first sensed it when I picked up a copy of the Financial Times going through Heathrow in February. I was behind the news cycle. I read through the pink paper and felt informed.

Normally I wouldn’t be satisfied with just one news source. No matter how much I overweight my personal preferences to business papers I wouldn’t limit myself to just those publications.

But then I realized I had neither the time nor the patience to get up on the nuances of the day. I love the news business and even I felt weary about wading through the firehouse.

If a new hound like me who loves reading reactionaries of all stripes couldn’t do more than scan some financial numbers how did everyone else feel? Not good, not good at all.

The Normie Restoration

We are reaching a fascinating moment in history in which you can be shockingly well informed about almost anything in real time.

Naturally this means we “know” less than we ever did. I can read propaganda from every viewpoint straight from the source straight on Telegram chats. The most informed know they getting just a fraction of the story.

During the Great Dislocation (roughly 2019-2023 though many of us went into much earlier), there was a new openness to seeing beyond institutional consensus. We saw a flourishing of open condemnation of all forms of institutional knowledge and media was at the epicenter of much of that rage.

Many groups did not do well with the newfound power they had found in the hands of shifting alliances and new attention.

My theory is that the lunatic fringes of both the left & right have handled their digital powers poorly. As they did not handle the attention with care we will see a return to mass media preferences as people return to “non-normalcy.” Our trust has been spread too thin and too far and everyone has to tend to their own.

Who, or even what, ends up being the mass media substitute going forward ks not yet settled as the waning days of cable television & national papers will not disappear until the Boomers move on.

We are starting to realize little value is accrued by sourcing news from many sources as more competing narratives spin out to Cray Cray Land. Everyone has become audience captured. And not all audiences are equal. Not all voices are equal either.

People may think I’m insinuating that it’s about control or truth or ideological niche. I want to disabuse you of this notion. Media is about attention. People with different goals want your attention focused on what they think is important.

Anyone with responsibility has an attention limit. People with responsibilities are the people with power. They can’t manage with endless attention conflicts. They can and do resolve these conflicts on their attention all the time.

And many of them are about to resolve that by not paying attention. So you have to ask yourself if you think they are wrong. The new non-normal isn’t very forgiving of distraction.

Categories
Chronicle

Day 1095 and 2023 Round Up

I’ve been sick for the last week and a half or so, so this round-up is coming on the last day of 2023.

As you may have gathered from my title schema, I have been writing every single day for 1095 straight days.

That means I’ve been doing this for three years which is a satisfying achievement. If you’d like see my favorite posts of 2021 here is a link to my first year round up. My round up for the second year of writing in 2022 was quite comprehensive as well.

Below is a list of categories that held my attention in 2023 and the posts I wrote as I tried to make sense of my rapidly changing world.

It probably tells you a lot that the largest sections are artificial intelligence, startups and community. I think this includes almost 50 posts so it’s a testament to how busy the year was that I couldn’t narrow it further. I spent time in Prague, Puerto Vallarta, New York City, Austin, Seattle, Frankfurt, Tallinn, Helsinki, and Amsterdam which is way more travel than I expected. Much of my focus was on investing work for chaotic.capital and is reflected across almost all categories.

Artificial Intelligence

Day 1078 Why We Keep Centering Ourselves

Day 1072 and Math is Leverage.

1055 and Freedom to Compute

Day 989 and Autopoeitic Ergodicity

Day 980 and Beff Jezos

Day 897 and Cruft and Email Bankruptcy

Day 826 and Alignment

Day 780 and Copernican Crisis of Meaning

Community

Day 1070 and Allocating Social Capital

Day 1055 and Shipping, Smoothing Narratives and Making Reality or Effective Acceleration Is About Choice

Day 1053 and Neo Revivalism

1033 and Agency Explosion & The Network State

Day 1025 and Petit Aristocracy

Day 978 and The Great Twitter Unfollowing

Day 932 and Schisms

Day 847 and Erasure in Crypto

Aesthetics

Day 1040 and Being First

Day 1023 and Automatic Doors

Day 1007 and Half A Decade After Premium Mediocrity

Day 961 and Repeating 2003 Aesthetics.

Day 748 and Molly Millions (William Gibson Casting Choices)

Travel

Day 1038 and Travel, Middle Markets & American Exceptionalism

Day 1030 and Helsinki

Day 1029 and Nordic Ferries

Day 1019 and Old Town Tallinn

Day 876 and Americana in Germany

Day 863 and Abstract The Pain Away

Day 749 and Beef in Prague

Economics and Politics

Day 1019 and Tallinn’s Free Enterprise & Alcohol

Day 1010 and Exogenous Shocks

Day 907 and Unaccountable Bureaucracy

Day 904 and Wardogging on Mobile Phones

Day 817 and Mourning A Bank

Day 811 and Hierarchies

Day 807 and Hyperinflation

Day 803 and Killing Strangers

Day 799 and Black Friday in Silicon Valley

Day 740 and Immigration Failures

Emotional Work

Day 1014 and A Fragile Birthday

Day 1000 and Milestones

Day 987 and Eggs

Day 902 and The Singer Lasts A Season

Day 895 and How to Stop Being An NPC

Day 845 and Fucked Fertility

Day 791 and Bathing Suits I’ve Never Worn

Day 784 and Endocrine

Day 731 and Auld Lang Syne Motherfuckas

Startups

Day 1001 and Circumstances Change

Day 970 and I’ll Be Your Publicist

Day 962 and Milestone Based Seed Rounds

Day 939 and Culture Wins Not Culture Wars

Day 906 and Resilience Tech

Day 840 and Chaos Magic

Day 783 and The Alliance (Vanity Fair Magazine coverage of chaotic.capital which is covered in two pieces on the blog)

Homestead & Montana

Day 976 and Chores

Day 969 and Hot Chicks

Day 958 and Civic Engagement

Day 940 and Buying Dishes

Day 856 and Springing Into Action

Day 766 and Weather Station

Categories
Politics

Day 1076 and The Encryption Wars

I’ve been exploring historical American attempts at regulation of computing as part of my #FreedomToCompute effort. We have an excellent example from the Clinton era which are colloquially called the Encryption Wars.

This campaign might be instructive as we decide what kind of regulatory climate might best foster machine learning and artificial intelligence innovation globally as well as what might to the best defense protections for individuals and groups who wish to work productively with approaches like inference databases and large language models.

This overview of the pressure campaign against encryption and the ultimate triumph of strong encryption rights in Slate illustrates how we very nearly made privacy much harder to preserve in America. Note that Slate is a very liberal publication but wrote the piece in 2015. A very different era of liberal policy making.

That’s why the key takeaway from the conflict is that weakening or undermining encryption is bad for the U.S. economy, Internet security, and civil liberties—and we’d be far better off if we remembered why the Crypto Wars turned out they way they did, rather than repeating the mistakes of the past

Slate

This piece included a number of negative consequences from reducing encryption in exported products which eventually undermined our own national security interests in protecting citizen’s own privacy. A lesson we continued to learn the hard way in the middle aughts Patriot Act “war on terror” era.

It’s worth skimming a review of the era from ChatGPT.

Silicon Valley played a crucial role in lobbying for encryption during the late 1990s. Tech companies and privacy advocates, realizing the importance of secure communication, actively opposed government attempts to restrict encryption. They argued that strong encryption was essential for protecting user privacy, fostering e-commerce, and ensuring the security of digital communications.

In response to this pressure, the Clinton administration began to reevaluate its stance on encryption. In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Executive Order 13026, which relaxed export restrictions on encryption products. This marked a shift towards recognizing the importance of strong encryption for both national security and the technology industry.

ChatGPT synopsis

Categories
Chronicle Media

Day 1075 and Behind The Scenes

I am a firm believer in doing as much journaling in public as I can as it’s a forcing function for myself as a thinker but also because it allows others to locate me in the vast expanse of an increasingly fractured virtual landscape.

But sometimes I have to do work that I can’t make immediately public. A lot of what I do never gets put public and I have to find ways to remind myself what I was doing without being glaringly obvious about it when I must keep someone’s trust.

Also because most people are mostly concerned with themselves vague poasting can do a lot of the work. Everyone will assume it’s about them. Cue Carly Simon “you’re so vain!” But most people won’t bother to ask.

A fair number of people rightfully don’t feel like they are public figures even as increasingly we all live some version of our lives in public. So a lot of social cues go into protecting trust.

Internet native people like myself have come to accept that there is no privacy. The divide between generations is probably less clear than you’d expect. But if you grew up online you know you can’t always control where your content and identity goes. Controlling it is like controlling the weather. Only conspiracy theories believe it can be done and they probably agree on who does it. Sorry there’s a joke about how the internet is filled with Nazis.

Security online has mostly come by through obscurity. But that’s not an absolute defense as anyone with a little bit of forum skills can absolutely fuck your life. This will only get worse as artificial intelligence helps us sort through things.

The Zoomers are particularly good at this and they grew up with things like swarming, catfishing and other hostile virtual low trust behaviors in anonymous environments. Honestly internet hygiene is for shit but basic common sense can do most of the work. So stay safe out there and remember some people live on attention. Be careful how much you give them.

Categories
Finance Internet Culture

Day 1001 and Circumstances Change, People Do Not

“The last sustainable edge in markets is arbitraging human nature.”

I had the good fortune to spend an hour and a half with an iconic Wall Street investor last week. I was invited to be a guest on Jim O’Shaughessy’s podcast Infinite Loops. I felt like the luckiest woman in the world.

I’m blessed to have Jim as one of my “Twitter mutuals” where I’ve come to appreciate his endless curiosity, deep empathy and kind friendship for the players of the “infinite game” of life. Plus he’s got the strongest gif game in the business. You should follow him if you don’t already.

I’ve been privileged to work with Jim and the OSV team as one of my LPs in chaotic.capital. Being entrusted with capital from some of finest minds in investing has been as intimidating as it is inspiring.

My fund is an early stage pre-seed venture fund that backs weirdos. Our thesis is simple. The world is increasingly complex, chaotic if you will, and only the most agile will win. We look for those that have the agency to adapt to the one true constant; change. Circumstances changed by the moment but humans remain reassuringly the same.

Obviously it’s hard to imagine a better LP than OSV for chaotic.capital. We are deeply aligned in our thinking on agency, agility, and adaptability. As much as I’d love to prattle on here, I’d recommend you check out the very wide ranging conversations between Jim and I. We cover a lot of ground practically and philosophically. I hope you enjoy it.

Categories
Community Internet Culture

Day 989 and Autopoietic Ergodicity

In one of my group chats, I hang out with a bunch of rationalist machine learning engineers who are happily climbing the rungs of accelerating life.

I really love the energy of the community as it’s centered tangibly around making things. It’s a little less talk and a lot more action. It’s got a bit of a feeling of Stack Overflow’s early helpfulness but without the Hacker News nerd sniping culture. It’s like the best of a small Reddit thread but for dudes who want to make shit with artificial intelligence.

Now, of course, every community finds itself with disruptive members and turf fights over social mores. Virtual spaces are notorious for clout chasing and personal dramas. Veterans of green text wars are familiar with Geeks, Mops and Sociopaths in Subculture Evolution.

And so it seems fitting that last night, in a much bigger very public egregore that is e/acc’s online community, we got to witness an immune reaction to someone trying to apply non-consensus standards.

I spent an hour watching it play out last night and then went back to reading before bedtime. I’ve got some personal investment in the space and it’s people, so of course that’s what I’m doing on a Friday Night.

But as I got up the next day and saw everyone going back to work, a insightful lowbie named bmorphism (slang for smaller anon accounts on Twitter within subcultures) introduced me to a term I’d never heard before. Autopoietic Ergodicity. Or how do multi-actor dynamic systems self regulate?

He introduced me Autopoietic Ergodicity via a link on PerplexityAI which seemed appropriate. And it got me thinking about how we as individuals interact on a much wider system and how it interacts with us.

The term combines two ideas by positing that complex adaptive systems (like living organisms or ecosystems) exhibit self-regulating behavior that enables them to maintain persistent patterns while also experiencing change from external influences. These systems are capable of minimizing changes caused by random factors, ensuring their essential dynamics remain stable without needing to undergo a complete reset or cycle back to the initial state. It’s like having a dampening mechanism that continually adjusts for fluctuations, allowing system resilience and long-term persistence in an ever-changing environment.

It’s my suspicion that something special is happening across portions of the fracturing social web as most of our platforms go back under more centralized control. The system is fighting back.

A meme using a Dune visual that originally has the elder Etreides saying to Paul “we need to cultivate desert power” with a substitution “autist power”

The grey tribes that have populated Silicon Valley have an opinion about the future. And it’s a positive one. We’ve got to find ways to be resilient in the face of memetic interference on our systems. There will be high energy distractions. We’ve got to be reminded that it’s a competition for efficient use of energy and we shouldn’t let it be drained. We’ve got to focus on making things that speak for themselves.

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
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