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 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.
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”
And I got to about May and realized I didn’t feel like I needed to put more into the organization. I had 4 medical procedures involving surgery. My father died. My best startups all raised rounds to scale. You can find your own way from there. It’s been a hard year despite the wins.
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.
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.
Most religions, and many flavors of political governance, focus on dangers of consumer markets and the dangers of overweighting and overvaluation of material things.
It’s just that if we look at the subject from a different direction, it’s quite clear that humans love to make things. Sure we focus first on shelter, food and water but we quickly use our excess capacity to produce. Climbing up Maslow’s hierarchy we look for ways to make things for ourselves and others. If we make surely we must use?
So much of our lives are dedicated to the making of things. We have children. We make tools that make the making of our needs easier and faster. We make art and music. We adorn ourselves with decorative objects.
So why is it that the consumption of the things we make as humans have such a bad reputation? If we didn’t consume adequate food we wouldn’t be able to reproduce. If we didn’t make and use shelter those offspring wouldn’t live to adulthood.
It seems to me that as in all things we make we do so as part of our commitment to being in a community with each other. A Buy Nothing Day may seem necessary when the balance tilts too far from making to consuming but each and every one of us is enabled to make wonderful things for each other. So go shopping if you like.
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?
I don’t quite know what it is about San Francisco but it’s just not my town. I love so much about it San Francisco. And it has much to love. But I’ll never love it the way it deserves.
I love what once represented in culture, technology and history, I love its portrayal as the epicenter of a certain kind of future. Whatever universe got us to Star Fleet Academy seems even if 2025 was pretty bleak for them too. Most importantly I love my friends San Francisco. It’s impossible to base a career on startups without spending some amount of time here.
But I just do not love being here for any amount of extended time. I find myself in an absolute misery adjusting to it every time.
Even when I lived and worked in neighborhoods with microclimates more suited to my preferences, I struggled. Dry, sunny and friendly is surrounded by gray, damp and miserable. And you can’t easily get out of where you live. Everything is 30 minutes away by car and the only way around that is biking.
The rolling hills in the 7×7 block that make up the core metropolitan area are a fair representation of my moods and the city’s fate. You can enjoy spectacular highs but you see the lows spread outward before you and it makes you question why you should have this unfair vantage point. Right up until you are trapped by the mountains at the horizon. San Francisco makes it easy to forget the rest of the world.
Some people manage to find an entire world here. I envy that. All I ever feel is hemmed in. It deepens whatever mood I am in, and heaven forbid I experience a depressive fit as you can roll very dark and deep here.
The expense, the hassle, the status games, and somehow (still!) the lack of women are all points in its disfavor. You can tell it’s a boom town because it’s where men seek their fortune and women don’t seek the men with fortunes. San Francisco is probably the best advertising for women seeking men beyond their utility. And they have tried importing the art hoes it just work. I promise it’s been tried.
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.
