Tag: Semiotics

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Chronicle Internet Culture

Day 42 & Audio Engagement

When a new social media application hits the J curve, it’s the most exciting feeling in the world. The magic of network effects kicking in to make each day on the app more valuable than the next for its users.

It’s also stressful as hell for teams because everyone is watching and has opinions. So I feel a little bad that today I’m going to talk about live audio talk radio app Clubhouse, but it’s on my mind and I made a commitment to myself to hit publish every single day, so here I am.

First some disclaimers. I didn’t join the beta in the spring because early users do the bulk of culture building and I didn’t think I had it in me. Several female friends of mine had negative experiences and I didn’t want to be on clean up duty. Toxicity compounds and I get plenty of it having significant visibility on Twitter. I’ve been doxxed, stalked, harassed (my favorite story is about Glamour Magazine’s attempt to do a crowd sourced Dos and Don’t section), and canceled by Gawker. So I’m inclined to steer clear of being an early adopter these days as I don’t have the emotional bandwidth to build positive communities that I’m not getting paid to build. This is not a commentary on whether I think Clubhouse is a good or bad place so much as a personal preference I have.

So I’ve only been on Clubhouse since it hit exponential. That means most of my feedback reflects the experience of the app hitting popular consciousness and not it’s early Silicon Valley FOMO insider days.

Audio is a wonderful medium that carries emotional depth. It connects you more intimately and is exceptional at narrative. It’s also much slower as an informational conveyer than writing and an attention resource consumption hog when you pay attention (some people like background noise, I personally do not). These two factors are the driving tension in the Clubhouse product. You feel connected listening to other humans, but your attention quickly lags as your brain works faster than the content.

Unlike in photo feeds, or a mixture of image and written content, you cannot scroll out of a lull. And unlike in precorded podcasts you cannot play it at 2x speed or rewind for something you missed. So you get stuck in boring rooms in Clubhouse but feel bad that other nice humans bores you. People are on a stage in Clubhouse “rooms” so you tune out, as unless you jump on stage there is no way to improve the engagement. And in large rooms you aren’t getting on stage.

But you shouldn’t feel bad that you’re bored because it actually is usually pretty boring in Clubhouse. People don’t naturally talk in consistently engaging ways without significant production and preparation. No one is always concise and engaging. Literally being “interesting” means to hold interest. And no one, not even A list actors or television hosts, are interesting all the time. Even though they have entire teams dedicated to making it seem like they are.

So what does this mean?

First, Clubhouse is going to need to elevate influencers that have experience in the kind of production work that works in audio. That probably means talking product cues from talk radio like call screening, cueing the audience what is coming next, having prepared topics and set time frames and giving audio stitchers to drive attention. TikTok is the gold standard in narrative tool enabling creation and might be a good source for product inspiration on what tools to give those on stage.

Clubhouse is also going to need to decide if they want to be more conversation driven. A stage and an audience naturally begets status anxiety and a one-to-many dynamic. But that means you can’t drive the same massive numbers as a one-to-one or many-to-many social space. Maybe they will be content to have a smaller influencer driven creative pool that brings in audiences but they will be forced to adapt their tools to that reality. In that way it looks more like Spotify. People use Spotify because the talent is there and it happens to have some social feature. I believe Clubhouse could pull this off as it certainly has the money for it and there is clearly an appetite for produced audio. Rush Limbaugh is a very rich and influential man (disclaimer I worked at 77WABC as an EA and did stints on his show) and there is room for more types of voices.

I’d personally prefer a conversational platform as a user. I was a rabid fan of the first iteration of Anchor before it became a podcast product. It was call and response “voice messages” initially. It was enormous fun to talk into the ether and get messages back. I still talk to friends that I made on it. To call back to my opener, it was a magical time as the app grew quickly around a massive influx. They eventually pivoted and sold to Spotify for what was clearly a better business, but I look back on those few months as some of the best time I’ve ever spent on social media. The magic of asynchronous audio messages made me feel in control as a user. There something I don’t feel I have yet on Clubhouse which has given me a sense of being overstimulated and even anxious. Timing choice is a significant part of social media scale for users as not everyone can be extremely online.

Clubhouse’s product choices in the next few months will determine how long they can keep that magic going and for how many people. Their team has captured something special for a lot of people and and they some of the best institutional backing in venture capital. I’d personally love if they went in a more conversational less status audience driven direction. But it’s not my startup so all I can do is comment from the sidelines and wish them the best.

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Chronicle Internet Culture

Day 30 and Aesthetic Signals

I’ve been chewing on an investment thesis for a bit.

Any of the angel investing I’ve done has mapped back to some very obvious principles in hindsight, and while I’m not quite ready to put it all out there, I’ve been doing the work to formalize it. I even bought the domain chaotic.capital.

I bring all this up because I’ve been thinking a lot about how aesthetics layer up to telegraph intellectual principles as part of my thesis work. One of the directions I’d like to consider is frustratingly expensive. In most established upper or hipster class aesthetic trends, the difference between being top half and top decile is probably the matter of only a few thousand dollars and working with someone who has taste.

The difference between top 10% and top 1%? At least a hundred grand. To really be world class takes millions.

We like to think that style doesn’t cost a whole lot of money. We give lip service to taste as an intrinsic talent. But it’s closer to being a skill developed through work and study. The people that make culture for a living have an eye for the granular details that make an aesthetic coherent. They can spot the third derivative inspired byproduct at a glance, and give its genesis to you step by step. They don’t do this to be snobs necessarily (which those who are insecure in their tastes tend to think) but simply because they cannot unsee their own aesthetic insights.

The downside to taste being partially a function of study is that if you want to adopt an aesthetic that has history, you can’t really half ass it.

This inexorably leads to new aesthetics arising and evolving simply because those with some study know they cannot afford to pursue an established aesthetic. If they did pursue something with lineage and no budget, they would need to bring an order of magnitude more taste to the whole affair. Now this doesn’t matter if you are middle of the pack. A spit and polish will do you good. But if you want to go from top ten to top one you need to invest the money and talent to get that order of magnitude.

And if you can’t? Well you probably need to pick a fresh aesthetic direction less burdened by history. Harder to pick it apart by showing it’s full lineage for one. But more crucially it gives you the space to build your own.

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Chronicle Media

Day 29 and Momentum

I haven’t felt so invigorated by the internet in a long time. I’ve had a week of joyful chaotic fun alongside my virtual friends (which during pandemic times includes my IRL friends too). Without the alt right and their mascot President Trump sucking all the air out of the room I’m seeing a lot of relief. The slight diminishing of the existential threat has lead to a lot of what I can only call silly season.

Just about everyone I’ve encountered has been filled with newfound creativity this week. Stonk mania is really only a piece of the goofy energy. To be sure I’ve been riding high on the wave of GameStop and the other meme stocks (though to be clear we actually made money with a well timed bet on volatility and only bought one share of $GME for the fun). But it’s more than that. The giddiness that comes from any kind of upcrash raises spirits in all adjacent fields.

And as I spend a lot of time in financial and social media circles it’s been a hell of a party. Granted most of us are waiting for a hangover to hit but more than a few of us are wondering if we’ve tilted into an entirely new chapter of chaos as the world grapples with the power of loosely organized crowds.

Whatever comes next a momentum is building from the energy. We’ve seen a possibility that chaos can be fun and not destructive. A sorely lacking feeling in the last few years when memetic armies only fought on one side. Now it’s a free for all. And that is potentially a lot more interesting.

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Chronicle Finance Internet Culture Preparedness

Day 28 and Limbic Memory

Today I want to talk about how this past year has set in motion the next hundred years of human imagination. Yes, I think it’s that important.

Mental elasticity is an incredible thing. We humans learn quickly and have a seemingly endless capacity to adapt to impossible things once we’ve wrapped our minds around it. Sadly though, forgetting doesn’t come as naturally to us as learning. Once we’ve seen the impossible happen, we never forget. Instead of storing miracles and crisis in the front of our minds like new knowledge, to be reinterpreted as new and possibly ephemeral, it goes right to our limbic back brain.

The limbic system is set in the deep structure of the brain where it regulates autonomic or endocrine function in response to emotional stimuli. It’s part of our survival response encoding. Which is why trauma is so crucial to evolutionary pressure. Those that survived, generally did because they took an impossible situation seriously. It becomes a part of our reactive unconscious survival instinct. And boy is this going to have consequences for American millennials.

The last year has had its share of impossible things occur. And we’ve gone about our business adapting to things that couldn’t possibly happen before. Early doomers were dismissed on the pandemic, political Cassandras ignored until an insurrection occurred, and now a new kind of financial mania which Stalwart Joe at Bloomberg calls an “upcrash”. He explains the impossible inversion using 1987’s Black Monday 22% drop.

Once people became aware that such a severe crash in so short a time was even possible, the likelihood that it could happen again was never dismissed. The consequences aren’t as big, but in a sense, what we’ve seen in GameStop could be thought of as a Reverse 1987. Upcrash. A gain so fast and rapid, that it might previously have been thought to be impossible.

Why do I include a seemingly jokey memetic internet troll in a list of traumas? Because a positive memory is just as jarring to our limbic memory as a bad thing. We overweight good experiences just as heavily as bad. Once the impossible becomes real our bodies retain the memory.

We’ve now got sense memory for global pandemics, political instability and positive market manias in America. Things we haven’t had for three generations (or more in the case of political instability). And the consequences, most of which remain unknowable, for these visceral impossibilities won’t leave our bodies till we are dead. We are stuck with the paranoia and exuberance of this last year till our grandchildren are in charge.

So we’ve just tossed several intense traumatic evolutionary events onto American millennials that not a single institution can do shit about. And I’ve honestly never been more excited for what our chaotic future might bring.

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Chronicle Internet Culture

Day 27 and The Short Squeeze

The speed at which we’ve transited from insurrectionist attack on the heart of democracy to every man strikes at the heart of corrupt Wall Start has captured my attention. The GameStop squeeze may possibly be the most interesting story of the modern social age. The first wisdom of crowds moment striking at an institution and doing enough damage to get the beast’s attention.

We’ve careened from institutional faith crisis to the next in the long trudge out of the 2010s. And doubled down in 2021. Because it’s fundamentally the same energy. Tearing down the capital to stop the deep state to rallying around GameStop against the man is a straight line. The age of the extremely online is here

Both events have strong kek energy to it. It starts as a joke. Some sophomoric humor on the message boards. It is hilarious and fun how we all cosplay hax0rs blowing up Big Hedge Fund. But it will not be funny joke when a pension fund implodes. Just as it wasn’t funny when we had a kek coup on January 6th. One sounds like a stretch. We could never find ourselves in a place where trolls blow up an essential financial instrument on which millions rely for their futures. But then no one thought a D list celerity pretending to be a businessman could ride a gold escalator into the White House either.

The GameStop happening is just the first instance of memetic market manipulation. Institutionals will get caught without realizing it. Because mimicry online lets idea evolution happen swiftly. The base reference materials quickly get widely diffused and most folks aren’t even aware of the source. Ideas get separated from the original context, for good or ill. Hence Trump and sedition being both serious and a joke. It’s funny till it’s a federal crime. You may not realize you are perpetuating something with source material that is meant to either redpill or push a grift or policy position. Which probably explains why there were so many confused Boomers who couldn’t figure out how they had accidentally committed treason.

I’d be surprised if we bring any politicians to justice in the capital attacks. But I don’t doubt the SEC finds a way to make internet mob pump and dumps illegal. Sure that would require that literally anyone in regulatory oversight roles understood how meme cults perpetuate. We can barely wrap our head around memes electing politicians. Moving markets is too much for the imagination. Except that it’s happening right now it just may threaten the powers that be. Fuck with democracy fine. Fuck with the capital markets. Now you’ve got our attention.

What worries me the most is despite seeing the straight line from danger to democracy to internet mobs throwing themselves at the markets, I am having so much fun watching it all unfold.

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Chronicle Internet Culture

Day 25 and Ease

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to my self limiting beliefs lately. The ideas I hold about myself and the world that get in the way of me changing. And one I seem most attached to is the myth of hardship.

I’ve fetishized the idea that life should be hard. Working through tough problems is good. Sticking it out through bitter failure is worthy. That goodness, attention, wealth and status are achieved through a moral pain.

I’m fairly sure I got this ridiculous idea as some type of parasitic add-on from Calvinist thought. It’s also preposterously, comically untrue. Like objectively the wealth, status and power in human society do not come from anything even resembling moral good. It’s this annoying fact that gives socialists succor in an otherwise unforgiving climate of capitalism (an objectively true statement that equally frustrates adherents of communitarian philosophies.)

So somehow I’ve equated hard work with good. So instead of pursuing talents in life where I enjoy ease and facility I force myself into difficult pursuits. I rationalize this as noble. But my core self knows that it’s bullshit to keep me stuck in the mud

So I am trying to resolve to not poo-poo that in my life that flows smoothly. I can do well at life by being at ease. I can lean into my talents and enjoy where they go without judgment.

But in the immortal words of every thirst trap: feel cute…might delete later.

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Chronicle Internet Culture Media Politics

Distraction unto Death

I wasn’t allowed to watch television as a child. My mother has a firm view on the pedagogical benefits of using your full cognition range as a developing child. She simply thought the television did too much work for you which hindered building mental acuity in a child. But she also has a more personal reason. She believes distraction breeds stagnation.

As I’ve mentioned before here, my parents were utopian hippies committed to the manifest destiny of Silicon Valley. A classic book of the radical “information longs to be free” crowd Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves To Death showed distraction as the primary tool of the tyrant. The real tyrant wouldn’t need force. They only need us to be distracted. Bread and circus for the plebeians to keep us complacent. In this sense my mother feared Huxley’s Brave New World more than she did Orwell’s 1984. In her view information need discourse, disagreement, and nuance. Television wasn’t a medium suited to debate. Particularly news programs who digested and provided a narrative and a moral arc. No one could discern facts or testable hypotheses from a story. That was an affront to enlightenment values, science, and frankly even religion (she hates when you drag belief into science). So I didn’t watch television as a child as quite literally it would make me stupid and lazy.

It is with this knowledge that I realize the main weapon the populist right has wielded the last four years was distraction. A constant drum beat of incessant crisis after crisis. Never having a moment of peace after outage after outrage was laundered through mass media insistent on making sure it never became normal. The #Resistance committed to remembering that “this is not normal” wore us down daily.

So in a way I think we have come out from under totalitarian thought. It was impossible to make progress on problems when one could only see the next crisis. The question is now how do we react from having constant distraction finally relieved? Do we realize the mess we are in? Distraction bred stagnation. But can we shake it off and begin to the think for ourselves again.

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Chronicle Politics Preparedness

Day 19 and The Anticipation

I’ve been hit hard by the sudden (lol) realization of the chattering classes that “it can happen here” both with the discourse surrounding the pandemic and America’s democracy crisis. Clearly anyone who deals in nuance has been concerned about our institutional capacity for sometime. But that realization becoming mainstream freaks me out.

I don’t mind being seen as a bit of a Cassandra. I think about doom precisely because I’m naturally optimistic. If I didn’t look at worst case scenarios I would live in a perpetually Pollyanna-ish state where I exude complete confidence that it’s all for the best. So I’d rather my public persona be one of concern and worry as I think it’s tactically more worrisome if I’m perceived as being overly bullish. Bulls never get the best prices. Please continue to think of me as one of your favorite bears.

So because I’m a bull hiding in bear clothing I really loathe when the zeitgeist tips into fear for everyone. I don’t know if that means I need to dial in my personal meter to greed to take advantage of the fear. Because if everyone is fearful then I need to go against that grain and be a bull. Contrarianism pays the bills right up until the second it fails spectacularly. The thing is I don’t actually believe anyone is fearful. We are talking a mile a minute about the threat to democracy and the rising death tolls but the entire upper class is riding the rising prices to greater and greater wealth. In a sign that I don’t have a particularly diverse social class everyone I know has has very good earning years. Everyone is rushing to invest and brag about their good fortunes. While simultaneously belly aching about how unfair it all is but really there is nothing they can do.

So what can I possibly use to temper my own temperament when it’s not at all clear where the zeitgeist lives? Is it fear? Or is it greed? is it possible that we are just petrified fat cats the entire lot of us? That would probably explain the banner year for gun permits. I quite honestly haven’t the slightest idea how the midterm plays out. All I can do is anticipate the second order effects. So I did a grocery order before inauguration and I looked at numbers for the spread of the nee covid variant. Only time will tell.

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Chronicle Media

Day 16 and The Yips

I’ve always felt safer knowing more than less. It’s a childish view as the world is filled with unknown unknowns and the quality of information someone like I can get is better than it used to be but also potentially dangerously over saturating. Safety is illusory. Knowledge only gives you so much.

And yet I’d rather be on top of the information wave than slip off the board and have it drown me. Silly a metaphor as surfing the web can be, its helpful. Your ride your information environment you never let it crash over you. But last week I lost my footing on the information and got dragged under the wave. I was drowning in emotions. So I gave myself some time to catch my breath on the proverbial beach. I asked my husband to stop sending me information flow. I bought a bunch of relaxation driven products (because consumption ever solves anything). I promised myself that I would give myself more distance between myself and the yawning sea of media. And I became afraid of getting back on the board and riding the next wave. I got the yips. Every time I tried to navigate a story critically I couldn’t think it through. All my finely tuned skills for being extremely online. Poof! I thought perhaps I’d reached a point where media would only provide me anxiety and not power and knowledge. But after a few days of hikes, conversations with my mother, lots of meditation, and hours of talks with friends I found myself back online today surfing. The yips has passed. I had some good insights. And I was back on the wave again. Confident and without anxiety.

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Chronicle Internet Culture

Day 15 and The Wolf You Feed

A perennially popular “just so” story newly reborn as meme is The Two Wolves Inside. Not to be confused with the also excellent three wolves howling at the moon tee-shirt, this parable has a bit more payoff.

You can find endless “graphic design is my passion” variants of the parable from charming Etsy shop hipster versions to deeply weird mashups of Corinthians and Lanape culture. Thanks Art of The Christian Ninja Pastor dude. I’ll pick the firefighters training blog variant as beefy bros that save us from fires seem as good as any to own up to existential food demon metaphors. It’s not the best of the bunch and missed key elements like the wise grandfather telling the boy a story. But it absolutely captures the spirit of heinous layouts and type treatments meant to inspire you to greater things. Which is probably more core to the meme. As from there it reduces itself to further derp.

Why all this lead up? Why am I showing a badly executed meme that isn’t even the full story. Be patient good reader. Bad to the wolves. Well obviously we want to feed the good wolf. But also starving a part of you that isn’t socially acceptable also seems like a real asshole move. Why would you treat yourself so poorly? Or anyone for that matter. It’s like saying to a date “if you can’t handle the worst of me you don’t deserve the best of me” and then wondering why you get treated like a child. Bitch everyone needs to parent their screaming inner child. Blackmailing a potential partner into doing it for you is called codependency.

But I digress. I recognize the need for my own darker impulses. The tendency to swear (makes me relatable), the yawning almost never ending need for love and attention (makes me good at making things people want) and a litany of other bad wolf behaviors all serve a purpose. So maybe feed both wolves but recognize one of them can also kill you. Nurture it but keep it on a leash. Be the alpha of that pack. Oh god it’s been three wolves all along!

The tricky bit here seems to me where we extend out the metaphor to others. We want to be with friends and colleagues that are not fucking over their own wolves. Eating disorder wolves being starved out of fear. Ignored wolves. Misunderstood wolves. God it’s a parade of the kind of bullshit you have to empathize with daily as we grapple with the intrinsic sin and frailty of mankind. To say it makes the workplace a mess is an understatement.

It’s currently on my mind because I want to spend my time with people who are feeding and training their wolves for the best possible outcome for them. Genuine engagement with your faults and talents is a joy. It makes you better. It makes others around you better. And it’s just more fucking fun. People who refuse or are unable to engage with the sum total of their humanity just aren’t as interesting as those who are committed to becoming the best version of themselves. They also don’t tend to win as often, as limiting yourself out of fear is a finite game with only so many options to be seen as a winner. You either win a definite sum or you don’t. Evolution and bigger games and more interesting problems never arrive. I’ll just wholesale quote Alex Danco here.

First, finite games are played for the purpose of winning. Whenever you’re engaging in an activity that’s definite, bounded, and where the game can be completed by mutual agreement of all the players, then that’s a finite game In contrast, infinite games are played for the purpose of continuing to play. You do not “win” infinite games; these are activities like learning, culture, community, or any exploration with no defined set of rules nor any pre-agreed-upon conditions for completion. The point of playing is to bring new players into the game, so they can play too. You never “win”, the play just gets more and more rewarding. “

So ask yourself are going spending your time with people who are balancing out their wolves in a never ending game of joyful interaction? Or are you spending time with folks trying to kill off parts of themselves in order to win a prize that is simple and understandable. It’s not exactly a value judgement. Winning is good. Harmful behaviors towards others is bad. But I hope that we can all agree that a truly great life is a lot more nuanced than a scoreboard and a morality checklist. And yes this is me encouraging us all to spend time with better people who will support that.