Categories
Community Emotional Work

Day 899 & Simple

I have led a complicated life. I didn’t really know as a child that being raised by syncretic vaguely nomadic hippies looking for utopias wasn’t really all that relatable. Aside from the general revivalism ethos of America, most folks tend to ride middle of the herd.

There I was not realizing I had a nose for powerful evangelism. I missed that boarding schools and colleges were meant to put you in a certain place in society. Then I didn’t know that spending time inside cultural institutions like fashion was an aspiration. I didn’t really clock that startups, or venture capital, or fucking around online would be a nexus of power either. I just thought all those places looked cool so I showed up.

Maybe I was simple. Maybe I just flowed like water towards the chaos before it became the big show for everyone. I am someone who understands the Thursday Styles problem of timing and I like to get there a little bit ahead of time. Get good seats and sell picks and shovels. From there it’s just a matter of having the stomach for the ride.

But knowing where the boundaries on consensus are is what keeps you from being swept up in the madness, as a movement meant for small mysteries and initiates suddenly sees the harsh glare of vox populi.

And so I am called to remember it is a gift to be simple. It’s a Shaker tune if you recall. Speaking of religious revivalism. The internet’s second brain tells me they were a millenarian restorationistChristian sect with a dualist view of God and equality between the sexes. Quakers and Shakers clearly impressed American’s hippies with this catchy tune. I know I learned it by heart as a child’s.

Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free,
‘Tis the gift to come down where I ought to be;
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed;
to turn, turn, will be my delight.
Till by turning, turning we come round right.

Joseph Bracket

Maybe you also live a complicated life. Or maybe you are working to simplify your life. Whatever you do remember you can have more agency than you think. I’m sending you that message from the valley of love and delight that is Gallatin Valley.

Categories
Internet Culture Media

Day 892 and Synchronicity

Everything feels weird and it’s hard not to notice. Is it a wrinkle in time? Have we torn the fabric of reality? Did some kid in Las Vegas see aliens? Is that the tug of the multiverse on the edge of your consciousness? Maybe it’s a demon. Maybe it’s some x-risk scenario with artificial intelligence.

Our collective narratives about synchronicities have been pouring out on social media. No one is really sure what the fuck is going on and it’s showing up everywhere. Did the physicists at CERN accidentally fuck up space time? Have we been living superimposed on another reality for all of humanity? Can some people see the other reality? Can you? Can I? Did all of human religion have a point about supernatural shit and the Enlightenment was just a cope?

My favorite theory floating is we are only just noticing some anti-gravity experiment gone awry back in the day because commercial artificial intelligence accidentally revealed too many conflicting data points. Despite the state controlled AI’s efforts to keep a lid on shit we just couldn’t keep the aliens, or a breakaway civilization, or the multiverse or the lizard people under wraps and have been preparing for the big reveal for a while. Except no one is paying attention because shit is chaotic and we’ve all got bills.

Alien asked a wojack if he is shocked. Wojack is too busy to contemplate extra terrestrial life.

Did something happen in the 1940s and we managed to keep it under wraps until Sam Altman and company triggered the Vulcans to show up? Sorry I’m overlapping too many pop culture touchstones with too many niche Silicon Valley personalities for just one conspiracy theory.

All I know is even Elon Musk is looking to hire a witch and head of propaganda. But as a chaos magician I only work for my own LPs, founders and my family so he’s got to look elsewhere.

Need a head of propaganda and witchcraft? I need more then cash
Categories
Travel

Day 888 is a Very Lucky Post

I wrote this from a fourth tier airport lounge in between a layover from Seattle to Bozeman Montana. It’s all very Pacific Northwest. Anxious racist white people jostling for position in long lines.

I landed at SeaTac from Frankfurt and mostly breezed through customs. The evident benefit of being American with white privilege again. But the undercurrent of the frustrated business traveler was visible everywhere. Travel sucks

I was just happy I had a machine made cappuccino to keep me awake with a side of carrot cake. I wrote this at 3am for me in Frankfurt but 6pm in Seattle on Tuesday. I am publishing this on Wednesday at 2pm Mountain Time as I figured I’d be too jet lagged to do any real writing after an all nighter of flying. What is time anyways.

I wanted to intake the liminal space of the shrinking middle of business travelers. Everyone and everything feels shabby. Any glamour that travel had for me is long washed out.

The cosmopolitan sadness of travel that William Gibson wrote into Pattern Recognition has come to life in the slow decay of the globalization consensus. Souls strung out on strings behind road warriors.

My entire aesthetic on the road is based on subtle semiotic cues I learned from Gibson. His Blue Ant trilogy era. A bitchy high end urban gym and laptop work bag that doubles as a weekender. In subtle grey. Aer. My shipped direct from the Tokyo Muji grey soft four wheel roller. They don’t make it anymore.

My gear doesn’t show signs of aging but everything else around me looks worse for wear. If the jackpot is coming it’s here the little dislocations all around us. The annoyances build. The trouble adds up. And when travel isn’t good for business anymore that sets up a cascade for everyone. Lucky number 888.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 879 and Out of Home

It’s a holiday in America and Germany today, so this morning I went out to do some semiotic spotting like an elder millennial Cayce Pollard.

Just kidding (not kidding). I went to have breakfast at an outdoor cafe and went for a long walk. All imagery shown in this post was captured in service of a stroll. That stroll had a smoked salmon & horseradish cream on toast in the middle of it. I was walking a trendy mixed use neighborhood that was just on the line between hipster and yuppie.

I felt like I got in as I was wearing entirely unbranded minimalist garments. I was eyeing “out of home” advertising design elements during a stint a digital nomad in a major culture & financial hub. Yes, I enjoy my own main character energy when I’m pretending I’m a Gibsonian heroine.

It was a fine breakfast had the cafe’s outdoor seating not been underneath forest of trees in full pollination mode lining an urban roundabout. I must be Cayce twice over as my allergies weren’t limited to fashion.

The pollen was killing me after two hours. Cayce is the protagonist of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition and makes her living in advertising by having an extreme sensitivity to corporate logos and mascots. My eyes were itchy, red and swollen and my own aesthetic attention felt equally uncomfortable. Everywhere I looked was mass market diffusion “direct to consumer” aesthetics. Including on an Ann Frank day poster.

Out of home advertising for Ann Frank Day

The poster’s design included multiple 2016 style Pantone shades of blue including teal with geometric blocking. It gave the impression it was a cookware brand being advertised on the New York City subway somewhere in the middle of the DTC design boom.

Advertising posters in Frankfurt

Other design elements also brought to mind the DTC rush for me. Flat lay citrus with a reusable shopping bag? A pensive woman on a simple prop like a stair case? I can’t tell if it was Everlane circa 2014 or Bon Appetite from before their woke crisis.

Inexplicably a Linkin Park tribute band
Heavy Psych Stoner Kraut

Thankfully weirdness did eventually prevail over the seamless sameness of flattened consumption messaging. A Linkin Park tribute band and something labeled “Heavy Pysch Stoner Kraut” gave me some faith that weird shit was alive and well. Sanded down Silicon Valley by way Baudrillard consumer aesthetics may be soothing in their sameness.

But I was searching for friction. If only to distract myself from being itchy. Pollen and boutique design agency products make me break out.

Categories
Culture

Day 877 and Punch The Nazi Nerd

I want to rant a little too much today, as it’s a holiday weekend and it’s all sunshine, apfelsaftschorle and pretzels but I need to rant a little bit. For a treat.

Anyone with too much focus on the esoterica of life; the nerds, the dorks, the dweebs and the outcasts, has some baggage. I never felt particularly uncool as a kid because I moved around enough that I didn’t have a lot of past embarrassments to hold me back. Odd when a childhood trauma ends up being protective.

But I’ve met plenty of genius in my time and a lot of them carry deep hurt from how they were treated as kids. The trauma isn’t always healed. And hurt people hurt people.

We used to expect an even trade from our nerds. You’ve got righteous technical skills and understand how those changing tools will affect the culture of the world. You see a future and hack at it because you’ve seen the rules of the game.

We need those rule breakers because they keep us honest. But we’ve got to keep them honest too. Life is a team effort and it takes all kinds of skills to pull off something great. The hacker nerd archetype is just one member of the team.

But if you are playing on easy mode, and the nerds have been on easy mode since we needed whiz kid scientists to fight the Nazis, then you don’t handle rejection too well. Everyone thinks they are owed something on the internet for being barely above a midwit. And they are probably right as we are living Idiocracy out there right now.

But you’ve got to have boundaries. Nowhere is that truer than with someone with a deep hurt. Probably why we have company politics, project managers and deeply angry startup mommies who spend their whole ass lives managing the feelings of man-babies who produced code. It ain’t great for moral.

I don’t know why nerds are such children. They say you stop growing at the age of your first trauma. Maybe. Or maybe if you had someone to clean up the hurt for you as a child you don’t know how to clean up your own messes as an adult. Mommy issues everywhere I enjoyed being a spoiled bitch more when I didn’t realize the enormous cost. Rationalize and reconcile what you can.

I don’t mind the hurt when nerds deliver us energy and weapons and the stars and whole new ways of self organizing. I’ve sided with nerds my whole life. Nerds are my ancestral people. Witches and rocket scientists and trailer trash chemists.

But if a nerd pretends the consequences of living with others doesn’t apply to them because they are so much more special, well you better be skeptical. Nerds can be bullied too. Sometimes you do in fact need to punch a bully. Punching Nazi nerds in particular is rarely a poor choice. The nerd bullies may need it the most. Remember it’s dweebs with delusions of grandeur who commit genocide and raise armies for fascists. Banality of evil and all that. Happy Memorial Day weekend everyone.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 876 and Americana

Americans have a tendency to think of themselves as the cultural norm. The default setting of media and movies and magazines has been the American empire. The world’s taste orbited our empire during nearly all television and cinema. I hear we Americans make our problems everyone else’s problems too.

It’s also a fantasy. Uncle Sam is a marketing gimmick. There is a propaganda machine even if it’s not organized by a sub committee of party loyalists. The vox populi push on our taste and our media industry will show them what is worth mimicking. Marketing works.

So it’s always amusing to see a bit of Americana marketed back to yourself. I saw this street advertisement for what appears to be a sincere sort of western show?

The Bosshoss Electric

I’m consuming an entirely different genre of Americana than someone in Frankfurt. Which I admit I’m not sure I fully understand as I think it’s maybe a sincere musical that has a western sparkly rodeo theme? Again the semiotics on it would require a critical theory degree. Which I guess you could get in the city of Schopenhauer.

Momma don’t let your boys grow up to be cowboys. Rodeo seems like a brutal pastime in a country with no social safety net or functioning medical systems. Maybe that’s why it can be romantic here in Germany. Maybe you’d get medical care if you ever came in contact with a bull.

Speaking of semiotics, I’m rewatching Yellowstone while in Frankfurt. Yes it’s amusing that the yuppie woman reclaiming her lost Western upbringing by moving to Montana is watching a soap opera about land barons outside of Bozeman. Simulacrum. Something that replaces reality with it’s representation. I knew Foucault would come in handy.

Dicke Butz authentic American cuisine
Categories
Community Politics

Day 871 and Collaboration in the Time of Cultural Cholera

Perhaps its a function of being an American abroad in Germany, but I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the social contract and the expectations we have for free association and collaboration.

Germany’s democratic socialism is abutting against the challenges of global market capitalism and cultural pluralism. And the strain is evident. Frankfurt is expensive and there are many competing populations from refugees to globo-homo cosmopolitans

I think only one in five people I’ve encountered appear to be native born German. It’s almost enough to make me feel like I’m in America. Which is to say I see the in-group and out-group competition clearly.

Different expectations for a civic polity can range wildly depending on the goal. We enable everything from humanity wide medical breakthroughs to individual physical health through incentives both individual and collective. And yes because I’m American I notice shit like who pays for parks and recreation. I also notice soda taxes. Choices are all around us and the incentives make it look like no choice at all.

Humans live at varying degrees of abstraction. Our capacity to go from whole to parts, and parts to whole, depends on education, temperament, intellect, emotional capacity and preferences.

And that diversity of views is what makes it so hard for us to infer what “chunk” of reality our fellow humans see. No wonder we struggle with collaboration as a species. Your fellow man is as sensitive to elite semiotics as they are to casual racism.

Where our new living history takes us is going to depend a lot on how we design incentives for collaboration that provides benefits to participants that are transparent. Otherwise I’d be strapping in for more civilizational struggles.

My aspirations include us finding ways to collaborate across much wider destinies with as much freedom for all can be managed. I’m hoping AI and crypto go hand in hand. High trust and no-trust are our only options at this scale. But like any reformation it threatens the current powers and worldviews.

Categories
Startups

Day 846 and Serendipity

Last night I arrived in Austin for my favorite annual cryptocurrency event called Consensus. If you are participating please consider coming to my interactive town hall on Thursday at 1:30pm where we have an hour of panel & audience discourse on the future of trust & community.

I am excited for this panel as I feel like I’m ready to own my experience as a professional community builder. It’s been a job in the social media era for a bit. But it’s only recently that we’ve realized the ecosystem of builders is tightly knit together by a tapestry of overlapping passions and competencies. It’s lots of different kinds of nerds.

We arrived earlier than expected which enabled us to go to an event with Jon Stokes (I was slightly more excited to see his wife Christina but Jon knows I adore him too). While we had lots of folks discussing heady issues like the network state, it is most joyful for me to discuss the more human aspects of life in a community. Who was looking after the kids and which one of our neighbors is housesitting. Practical daily living things felt like the natural connection of humans beings working together.

From there we went to a dinner with one of our most cherished real ones Ben Huh. The man knows food so I was thrilled to be feeling healthy enough to stay out and enjoy a meal with a table of deeply weird unabashedly themselves people. When we did introductions the question was “what is something you are obsessed with right now?”

The answers were wide ranging. High temperature cooking, textile pattern making, reality dating shows on Netflix (not for the record me but I am also obsessed), showing up as you are, sewing the perfect custom dress shirt, raising goats, riding tractors, reading science fiction mind bender The Three Body Problem, and mastering nervous system regulation (this one is me).

I felt like everyone I saw that night was one of my fellow travelers. The serendipity of overlapping passions and curiosity showed me so many ways I connect with diverse humans. I encountered politics as disparate as reactionary fascist and shitlib standard as everyone comes to grip with a future that feels as yet unwritten. There is a lot of serendipity on the frontier. It’s nice to be reminded that the future is built together.

Categories
Startups

Day 840 and Do You Believe in Magic?

The glory of writing every single day is you start to build m records of your own life. You notice how much your own personal cultural history is syncretic. I’ll always be a fan of blogging because it’s got chronology at its heart. Sometimes it’s good to see how we evolved over time.

Having a written record is hard and often dangerous. You own a lot of work in progress that doesn’t necessarily reflect where you landed. And internet opposition research is fantastic at catching you in a former evolution. We call it getting cancelled. But if you get it right you have the receipts.

But if you are an honest broker of your bets you will admit when you get better and more complete information. The real magic of startups is that markets are often excellent teachers of how we are just dead wrong. And if we listen to what we are told we can adjust. And as the old saying goes the market can be irrational longer than you can be solvent. The reverse is true too.

Consensus reality is a bit magical. I called our fund chaotic because the process of getting people to align is magical but it’s chaotic as fuck. It’s studied but experimental. It relies on rules and the temerity to break them. It’s chaos magic. I wanted people to see a bit of the woo woo in our fund name every day. Technology and magic are just separated by layers of abstraction. Go read Charles Stross.

So I was overcome with delight when I saw Geoff Lewis discuss how startups are magical. An all time delightful addition to the genre of how does venture capital and startup growth even work? Fred Wilson blogged so Geoff Lewis could vlog. And he did it with verve while discussing Dungeons and Dragons stats. Also he’s team maxed charisma like me so I am inclined to like him.

The fun part is that he and I don’t really overlap except on Twitter. We’ve never discussed any of this. But our syncretic workflows had overlapped. It felt like a small ecosystem knitting moment. An alignment of metaphors and aesthetics. It made me feel damned optimistic and yes I do believe in magic. And I hope you do too.

Categories
Aesthetics Media

Day 829 and Parasocial

As you may have seen in past posts, I am a fan of reality television. I believe it shows us a lot about popular culture and the human dramas that resonate this us.

There is something about being let into someone else’s life that is perhaps too titillating to resist. If you watch you will begin to empathize. And as we are social animals we will want to engage. We project some of our own things onto other lives that we see only dimly through the filters of editing and Instagram accounts.

I’ve been watching Love is Blind with a group chat. To say that the messages are spicy is an understatement. We are all engaged in the high human drama of dealing with your bullshit, finding a life with someone, and seeing your boundaries with a partner. Basically it’s trauma porn. You are seeing people’s open emotional wounds. But it’s also edited to make you feel that way. And we want to look because we might learn something about ourselves.

So the last weeks I’ve spent a bunch of time having opinions about Kwame and Chelsea and Micah and Paul. I care about what happens. And not just because someone’s mom is a stripper. It’s no wonder I’ve developed a parasocial relationship with television characters.

I’ve started to care about them because I see myself in them. But it’s messier and weirder so it’s safer. Surely we are better. And yet we see ourselves in them. It’s empathizing with humanity. And quite honestly I think more of you should watch these shows. It’s good to recognize the breadth of human love as revealed in all trashy glory that is reality dating shows. Honestly it’s fucking art.