Tag: Semiotics

Categories
Aesthetics Politics

Day 1852 and The Nothing

I did not have a good weekend. I feel the emotions of humanity’s current transitional phase too keenly. There are the wondrous upswings of hope and deep darkness that consumes anyone who bears witness.

I feel compelled to bear witness. Even though I know it harms me. Even when I know I am staring into a war, purpose designed to push me into or out of the myriad conflicting agendas of state, corporate, faith and cultural powers. A thousand agendas who wish us submit to their will.

I wish I had the guidance of the generation who led the world through modernity’s war torn emergence into our current networked age. Without knowing our future, would they be able to use their past to help us see through the fog that clouds our present?

I find solace in the children’s literature made by artists who lived through brutal dehumanizing totalitarian regimes. They told stories with truths so clear a child could grasp them.

I return to the works of Tove Jansson and Michael Ende again and again as I try to make sense of what it means to be human. Ironic that I should find human truths in authors who wrote of fantastical worlds filled with whimsical trolls and flying luck dragons.

And yet truths that seem crystalline in fiction distort when I apply the lens of my present. I recall Corinthian’s 1 “Through A Glass, Darkly” and know I am not the first to have such troubles. I will not be the last.

Ende wrote a fictional formless entity called “The Nothing” in The Neverending Story. The people of the realm Fantastica voluntarily leap into The Nothing. It has an irresistible pull.

Worse still, the destructive phenomenon changes the Fantasticans who become lies in the human world. Fantasticans who are destroyed by entering “The Nothing,” don’t just vanish. They reappear in our human world as false beliefs, deceptions, and propaganda that people mistake for reality. The symbolism is clear.

When we suppresses imagination and our inner life, our “lost” fantasies don’t disappear. As in shadow theory, they return as toxic narratives, distortions, and myths that make people “blind” to the difference between reality and illusion.

I do not wish for any of us to kill who we are. We walk into The Nothing and whatever version of ourselves comes out the other side is not the truth. I can only pray that I am not willingly walking into The Nothing as I bear witness.

Categories
Aesthetics Startups Travel

Day 1839 and Take A Load Off Fanny

I pulled into Nazareth was feelin’ about half past dead. I’m not actually in Nazareth, but I am feeling the weight of my travel and I do feel half past dead.

Laying in bed I’ve got The Weight’s classic on repeat along with remixes and algorithm recommendations. For what it’s worth Buffalo Springing is a mood that leads to Jefferson Airplane for me.

So I quote my way through today and encourage feeling my moods as I try to come down. There’s something happening here but what it is ain’t entirely clear. It was true then and it’s true now and I know it’s hard.

You can put the load back on me and go ask Alice if you need. But if you go chasing rabbits and you know you are going to fall, remember what the dormouse said. Feed your head.

The playlists of my parents and of the Silicon Valley counter cultural era can help guide by turning to the past to make sense of the present. And if it starts for you well, as I said go ask Alice what the dormouse said.

Logic and proportion have indeed fallen sloppy dead. And I am working to feed my head. But maybe Alice would encourage feeding my heart if any of us had thought to ask. So I am taking a load off. And I’ll put the load right on you. We can make it if we all stick together.

Categories
Aesthetics Politics

Day 1833 and Noriega 2 Maduro Boogaloo

We’ve had a couple of market trading days to adjust to the new world order being “absolutely no order” and it mostly seems fine. American can capture cartel leaders/heads of state that she dislikes. Weird but so far fine.

The only metaphors are crude puns (see what I did there) and Marco Rubio does every job memes. From the Golden Era of Iran-Contra to Manuel Noriega, it’s never been a better time to have an opinion on the Monroe Doctrine or a LatAm portfolio. Did you know Ollie North married his former secretary this summer? Fun!

I myself have none of this knowledge so the best I can do is imitate Mickey Rooney’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s character saying, “Donroe Doctrine.” Not very funny I know.

Yellow face being racist, perverting the Monroe Doctrine into a pan-Asian accent inflected Capote character is definitely cancel worthy but if you can’t imagine it I’m sure generative AI would oblige.

What’s worse is that my stupid inner monologue mimicry made me I wonder if Xi Jinping has enough of an accent when speaking English for Donroe Doctrine to be amusing. Americans never know these things. Neither does Reddit

Being profoundly American, this is all upsetting except where it is amusing, because the chaos era is firmly here and it’s hard to make any predictions, first derivative included.

That the world is chaos is now such common knowledge that it’s the stuff of moderate Substack consensus intellectuals.

I used to do more victory laps about how my own investment thesis is predicated on increasing chaos. Now I’m just reminded of how much I didn’t want to be right about my own thesis when I started.

Hopefully that hasn’t affected my capacity to stay ahead of the game. The numbers look good but the final score remains to be seen.Because as they say, “hate the game, not the player.” I’m playing to win.

As if we don’t win at making better technologies that stabilize our world then we all lose. I am a progressive when it comes to investing in new technologies that improve material conditions.

We won’t look at Uncle Yud as fondly as Uncle Ted when it’s time for eulogies. We will conclude that Chesterton’s Fence included a bit too much in the enclosure even if strong fences make for good neighbors.

Being a reluctant conservative makes it worse that I love being first. I am a hipster in an era without use for hipsters except the knowledge of what is about to make money. Hipsters are a useless bunch except as fashion editors or as capital stewards.

I happen to own the domain chaotic.capital. You’d think this would be proof positive of being a progenitor or originator of this investment thesis, but it’s such a common sense worldview now it’s about as useful as an NFT after the 2022 crashes.

I have bragging rights and my own metrics page inside AngelList. Which isn’t nearly as much fun as I expected it to be. It’s not bad having some financial flexibility from making good calls, but my primary problems remain health not talent so it’s less enjoyable than I presumed. Thankfully that means I will continue at it based on my own pace and instincts. Good luck out there!

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”

Categories
Aesthetics Culture Medical Startups Travel

Day 1826 and Some Best of 2025 Selections

Yesterday I wrote about the experience of my daily writing experiment rounding out its fifth year. It’s been a fun and often emotional journey that I find hard to fully capture. But I’ll attempt to list a few of my favorite posts of 2025 on the last day of year.

Healthcare and Biohacking

Day 1490 and Healthcare’s Sin Eaters

Day 1468 Deciding to Go HBOT and Starting HBOT

1567 and Turkish Medical Tourism

1565 and Elephant’s Eye

1560 and Getting an HBOT

Day 1517 and Blink Blink (First Incision of 4 Scalpel Incidents in 2025

Day 1503 and Managing Healthcare Projects from Mold to Hyperbarics

Startups

Day 1486 and Is There A Tech Right

Day 1510 and Turning Valar On

Day 1542 and Future Blind

Day 1572 and Reskilling

Media

Day 1485 and A New Pogue at The New York Times

Day 1581 and Lecturing at UC Boulder on Renegade Futurism

Day 1569 and the sky above the port tuned to a dead channel

Day 1496 and Maneuver Warfare

Politics

Day 1484 and Montana’s Right to Compute Bill

Day 1549 and Productive Primates

Day 1578 and Dark Start or Energy Realism

Day 1576 and a NatCon Boomer Kicks a Townie Millennial Out of Their Hometown

Trends, Cultural and the Academy

Day 1484 and Zoomer Identity Violence Trend

Day 1479 and Liminal Industrial Transport in an Empty Frankfurt International Terminal Pod Hotel

Day 1580 and Learning By Doing or Embodied Learning for Humans

Day 1575 and Renegade Futurism

Day 1555 and Modern Machiavelli

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.

Categories
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 1801 and Parked in Front of The iPad

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.

I am an unabashed fan of the franchise and what it offers up as a cultural mirror especially as different countries try to show the ways their status, class, colonial and power structures impact marriage.

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.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1794 and What We Expect From The Wives

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.

The video I was served after LevelsIO’s retweet of a video clip of Nicole Shanahan was certainly further down a worldview. But it was also a more positive view of the role of women could be if the Karen was not viewed as a villain but as a hero of social norms.

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.

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 1793 and Shopping Around

Black Friday is somewhere between a global celebration of shopping and an affirmation of consumerism as a shared cultural value.

It’s easier and much cooler to denounce consumerism. There is more cultural criticism material of shopping in the genre of commodity aesthetics than there are laudatory treatises on say the bourgeois virtues of shopping well.

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.

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 1781 and Paradise Lost in The Torment Nexus

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.