Tag: Shit Posting

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Aesthetics Finance Internet Culture

Day 128 and Financial Aesthetics

Humans have imbued money with so much significance over the centuries that financial spaces (merchants, traders, banks, trading floors, brokers, hedge funds) show us the style of their times better than almost anywhere else. Even when power centers have shunned money directly (democracies), and sometimes even because of it, money has dictated the soft powers of perception and relevance.

This makes investigating the styles of finance particularly fun as their signifiers tend to hum with unsaid anger, greed and resentment. Sexy stuff generally as we fixate on ever finer granular details to indicate that our taste shows us to be worthy of holding power (and hopefully money).

There is a reason popular culture loves the Hollywood treatment of Wall Street. Even if some of the most iconic touchstones like American Psycho were meant as dark comedies we didn’t perceive them at way. We were supposed to laugh at the business card scene not get turned on. When Gordon Gecko bellowed “Greed is Good” we were supposed to know he was the villain. We didn’t. We don’t particularly like watching these heros get their comeuppance. Giovanni Ribisi in Boiler Room ratting out the pump and dump scheme doesn’t leave a very satisfied audience but oh how we loved the second act when the gambling prodigy finds a way to go “legitimate” and become a millionaire. Just ignore the crash at the end.

Americans in particular love to fetishize our villains. Our media is littered with anti-heroes that over time become our actual heroes. We throw jealous narratives at the preppy alpha males but love it when their power is subsumed by someone who plays their games better than them. We are riveted when a protagonist emerges that knows how to best the alphas at their own game and emerges victorious. Just be careful you don’t overplay your hand and remain a villain (sorry Martin Shkreli you deserved better) as we need you to be seen as the good guy. It’s a delicate tension.

Think poor savant Bobby Axelrod in Billions becoming the titan of industry. Sure you know he didn’t start out as a classic alpha male (that hard knock upbringing) but I doubt you could tell at the end as he styles himself in the cashmere of his former enemies. Sure now it’s a hoodie but that’s a small inversion of the original sweater. The WSJ has an extensive shoppable feature on the style of the show. Now that’s cultural relevance. Turns out we do want cosplay Carl Icahn or Bill Ackman.

I’m particularly excited about the aesthetics of the next phase of financial heroes emerging from the financialization of cryptocurrency. Scrappy upstarts that want to make a more just and free financial system free of cronyism and accessible to the entire world is a beautiful narrative arc. The chaos of outsiders making the system their own has an ending we all know. You might start out in a tee-shirt and hoodie like Axe but beware the creeping encroachment of luxury goods looking to ride on your newfound wealth.

Turning doge gains into jokey NFT art is just a hop skip and a jump away from getting subsumed into the Art Basel scene. Lest you one day turn up and wake up in a new Bugatti. And while right now it may seem funny to buy a Lamborghini remember the narrative the world wants. You may just claim the mantle of a new kind of power. Or the Feds will come for you. Have fun out there!

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Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 127 and Horizontal Thinking

In the beginning there was the word? I dunno, seems more likely it was the image and then the Levantine religions got around to giving God the word. And thank God too as internet culture couldn’t exist without binary stuff.

But lately it seems like we’ve decided to go all in on horizontal thinking. Now it’s all about images. Gifs, YouTube videos, twitch streams and TikToks giving us cultural understanding not though the written word, but vibes.

The weaving together of aural, visual and emotional planes is an aesthetic that I’m thrilled to see Gen Z adopting en masse. If vibes had a gender, it wouldn’t. But seriously, backing away from the linear is a lot of fun and all of this vibes zeitgeist has been throwing my thinking back to a 1998 pop-science book called “The Alphabet and The Goddess.”

The Alphabet and the Goddess by Leonard Schlain is about humanity’s progression from horizontal to linear thinking. Shlain, a neurosurgeon, argues that that learning written languages, especially alphabetic languages, altered human brain function from holistic thinking to linear thinking. In other words, humanity wasn’t always so limited in processing. That’s a kinda new development.

I can’t say I have any real expertise in different theory’s of the mind like lateralization, but it does seem as if we seek to reduce complex matters such as ethics to simple rules and numerical measures in human systems, this despite us having significant holistic and metaphorical capacity.

If you coded “holistic, simultaneous, synthetic” views as feminine and the masculine as a “linear, sequential, reductionist”, you’re not alone according to Schlain. The scanning of the written word and visual processing of images may be different processes for the mind and for some weird ass reason we gendered them. Even though it’s just a straight up difference in brain processing. Schlain says:

Images approximate reality. The brain simultaneously perceives all parts of the whole integrating the parts synthetically into a gestalt. The majority of images are perceived in an all-at-once manner. Reading words is a different process. When the eye scans distinctive individual letters arranged in a certain linear sequence, a word with meaning emerges.

Basically humanity has been livin’ la vida linear for a few centuries, even though we have been plenty holistic as a species. But maybe with the internet our horizontal image driven thinking is coming back? Which brings me back to vibes. Vibes getting the New Yorker treatment this week.

I learned that vibes have a strong tie to the critical theory crowd. I suspect this pisses off a number of more literalist thinkers that are dedicated to trad aesthetics… I mean, ummm, Burkean economics? Whatever. Maybe the trads and red pillers sense the critical theory backstory?

Gernot Böhme identified “atmosphere” as the basis for a new aesthetics of perception, a kind of over-all feeling that has much in common with vibe. Heidegger had used “mood” to describe the quality of being in the world, and Walter Benjamin had identified “aura” as the feeling inspired by the presence of a unique work of art.

I think I’ve finally found the through line of why the “woke, critical theory, Gen Z, gender fluid crowd” and their vibes upset the “Athens to Jerusalem Western Civilization” crowd. Going from “great works” to “vibes” is going from linear to horizontal. It’s big dick energy being trounced by hot girl summer. The patriarchy is falling to glitter queers. And there is nothing anyone can do about it. And personally I like these vibes.

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Chronicle Internet Culture

Day 123 and Being Liked

I asked if folks cared if other people liked them today on Twitter. The results are surprisingly mixed on the issue.

A Twitter poll asking if folks care if others like them with 4 options: yes, no, yes but I like about it and no but I lie about it.

The four options were Yes, No, Yes But I Lie About It and No But I Lie About It. It is fascinating to see the breakdown in responses even a few hours into the poll. I don’t know what I thought the response would be but I don’t think it was an even split.

Now, of course, I didn’t ask if being likeable is good, or bad, or even helpful. I just asked if people cared. It’s likely people who do care don’t think it’s good that they care. And there are people who don’t care that maybe which wish did as caring about being liked may have benefits. I don’t actually believe that a third of folks don’t care as frankly society would look pretty different if 35% of us just didn’t care about perception. And sure you can argue that you don’t care but you hide the fact, but then your answer would have been the least popular option “no and I lie about it” which is lagging in the results. My guess is that a number of folks are aspirational “no” votes which I can respect. I’m confident I would have voted no in my twenties. I used to be an aspirational no vote

Currently my vote would be “Yes But I Lie About It” but I’m not sure if I’m lying to myself or others with that answer. I don’t generally care what people think of me but I think I lie to myself about needing to care. I think being liked is important and I want to act like I care more. I’ve got some hang ups about not having been a more palatable person when I was younger. Maybe if I had been nicer or better behaved or well…just more likable I’d be richer, more loved, have a better relationship with my family and other fantasies. I’m also not convinced that changing myself for others has the benefits I think. That’s just some 4 year old inner child trauma emotions. How others feel about me has little to do with me and a lot to do with them. That’s true for how I feel about others. My reaction to you says a lot about my emotions, trauma and hang ups than it does about if you are likable.

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Aesthetics Chronicle

Day 116 and Taking Up Space

I take up a lot of space. I spend time on social media because there is so much space you can literally be the President or a celebrity billionaire industrialist and there are still corners of the web you don’t penetrate. There is a lot of room for loudmouths, so much so that even someone like me still has plenty of room. I barely rate on the Elon Musk attention scale. Even when I’m screaming at best I crack into D-list zeitgeist. It’s like the privacy that comes with living in New York City. You can have some notoriety but the web doesn’t care. I like how you can feel alone.

The irony of course is that I think no one is paying attention to me. I think I’m an average Joe nobody that no one ever notices. This despite the fact that I am paid to be an expert in getting attention. No literally I cost a fortune (I’m worth every penny) but I’m somehow convinced I’m invisible personally. I can feel lost in a lonely world where I’m not even sure the people that love me the most can see me. I’m stuck in some lonely portion of my childhood where I felt abandoned so I’m replaying it out now as an adult. It’s not great but I get something from it.

Except this is a fantasy that is not true. I’m not that child anymore and I know how to get attention. I’m not alone. Even when I’m not consciously drawing energy to myself, people do see me. I can simply be myself and be seen. I command attention. It’s who I am.

You always think as a kid you will get some cool superpower like laser eyes or flying but nope you are going to get a super power like public relations or brand marketing. And honestly, when I’m not a self pitying victim I know those to be awesome super powers. You can make money and direct business and politics with those super powers. I just though I’d get something a little more aesthetic you know? It’s dope but also like adult superpowers are a letdown for your inner child.

I just need to remind adult me that I am seen. That even my normal personality not exerting her will force onto the universe is actually still quite visible. I can just exist and I’ll be holding space for myself. And it’s a good space with plenty of room for all of me. And still intimate enough to feel the love around me.

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Internet Culture Media

Day 111 and The Attention Economy

I like media. When I first moved to New York I had big dreams of getting hired to work at Condé Nast. This was almost immediately crushed by the reality that I was of average financial wealth (I moved to the city with about $500 and lived in a women’s SRO), not from a noteworthy family and notoriously poor at respecting authority.

But I was lucky enough to arrive in the media capital of the world just as blogging was turning into a cultural phenomenon. So it turns out I didn’t need to work for some bitchy queens to get a toehold in the industry! I was also wise enough to realize there was absolutely no fucking money in media early on so I watched many of my peers climb the ladder in new media jobs without being a member of the media myself.

I found ways to make money on marketing, branding, e-commerce and new media businesses. It was a lot more lucrative. Consequently I now have a large number of media friends (disclosure time) without any of the cultural baggage of being in media. Unless you count the time I was the first person to livestream fashion week. Which I didn’t technically have credentials to do but it got covered in Women’s Wear Daily.

I’m really grateful I never got suckered into actually being in media as I’d probably be broke, miserable and exhausted. And then if I admitted I was exhausted I’d have a bunch of the older generation of media folks dunking on me for saying that. Which is how I got into a shitposting thread with Glenn Greenwald today. Who I think might actually be in on the joke about grifter click culture.

If you don’t work in media I think you’ve got an inflated sense of their power and independence. It’s actually hard to make any money so you are always living at the whim of executives and editors. Most of them got into the business to tell crucial stories (naive but like good) and are stuck living at the mercy of a business that isn’t that lucrative.

A lot of bad faith arguments get made equating institutional power to individual power, and while it’s true having the power of the New York Times behind you matters, it’s also true that any random blogger like me has more freedom to pursue ideas than a staffer at a newspaper. So I think it’s sort of a reflection of insecurities anytime anyone gets worked up about media power. Especially if you know better as some of the older media folks like Greenwald do. These beat reporter exist in hierarchies with bills. They don’t have the freedom to shitpost like me or Glenn Greenwald. We are wealthy and independent. Beat writers are fighting constant turf wars just to stay employed.

It can also be true that beat reporters have to fight a constant battle for attention and clicks in order to stay employed. This means we get culture warriors and posturing. But both sides of each debate are engaged in a kind of elaborate attention grift. So when Taylor Lorenz or Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi sucker you in with a position on who is most virtuous the answer is whoever pays them. And guess who is paying? You and me. Our attention is getting monetized into all kinds of nifty revenue streams. I know this because that’s how I make my money. So next time you get worked up about the evils of media asking yourself why you are paying attention and who is benefiting.

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Chronicle Internet Culture

Day 108 and Energy Vampires

Recently I’ve been watching a mockumentary about vampires living in Staten Island called What We Do in The Shadows. It’s surprisingly funny for what you’d imagine is a set of basic gags. My favorite running joke is a type of vampire called an Energy Vampire. Everyone in the house is your standard drinks blood loved forever vampire except “Colin Robinson” who is an energy vampire. He lives forever by draining the life force out of people. It’s the most common type of vampire.

As you probably guessed Colin Robinson is meant to remind you of vampires you probably have in your own life. The show runs heavily off “boring” jokes but the real kicker is how energy vampires are perpetual victims. Colin Robinson is always sucking you in with pity and apathy. Energy vampires prey on your emotions.

As you might expect they have an episode about social media and Colin Robinson gluts himself on the low quality but copious amounts of energy available. There is also a troll joke. It’s pretty funny because it rings true. One accidentally viral tweet and suddenly your energy is being sapped by a crowd of vampires. The extremely online eventually pick up some Van Helsing skills to keep their energy from being drained. I like to think I rarely spend time online without my garlic, holy zingers and reply through the heart stakes.

The real issue is when you discover you’ve got an energy vampire in your real life. I recently realized someone was draining my life force. I thought they were a friend but a set of misunderstandings I finally realized they’ve been sucking me dry for years. They are pretty good energy vampires as I actually thought I liked them quite a bit. It took one overdrawing of my energy to wake me up to the reality that their tactics exhaust me. With the energy vampire metaphor you can enjoy a laugh as to whether this behavior is malicious or not. Energy vampires need to feed! But the end result is you feeling shitty.

As much as Colin Robinson jokes amuse me I do think I need to keep my energy vampire away. Their last feeding left me feeling tired and obsessive. I let the shitty feeling they induced in me upset other people close to me. And that’s just fucked up. Then energy vampires get even more energy. So I’m going to try to keep them at bay. I don’t need to prolong the life of someone feeding on me and I certainly don’t need to waste my boy immortal life as someone else’s emotional food.

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Chronic Disease Chronicle

Day 106 and Perceptual Drift

I often find it easier to talk about the darker parts of my journey from chronic disease once I’m already through the worst of it. If you are hearing about my long dark night of the soul it’s probably because I can see dawn breaking.

Maybe it’s because it’s hard to discuss the challenges when you are in the thick of them. Having any amount of perspective when life is at its worst is a skill reserved for religious scholars and internet advice gurus. The rest of us just try for hindsight being 20-20 at best. I admire the stoic philosopher types but I’m generally just happy to be able to survive rough days with a minimum of pain and angst.

It’s likely this tension between a better current reality and the heaviness of past challenges that made me so confused by the reaction when I posted about the envy I felt towards people who live healthy normal lives. A number of people checked in on me worried or concerned about how I was doing. I didn’t get it. I had just been discussing how well I’d been doing so why was everyone offering to pray me me?

I’d come to terms with some of the sadness and anger I’d felt during the worst days of my illness because I was doing well. I’d been posting about how excited I was that I felt great, had clean bloodwork, and was seeing better days. It was because I was doing so well I decided it was best to ruminate on the challenges I’d experienced. I was on the other side of it. Feeling well and energized meant I had the capacity to explore the dark places. When I’m actually in a dark places usually all I can do is survive the experience.

But I get that others didn’t see that now. They saw darkness and sadness and reach out to me with kindness. The love and support from people close to me and the messages and prayers from my internet friends all added up to me feeling like the good times will just keep getting better. If you are reading this I encourage you to share your journey. You just might get back the same love that I got. People are great that way.

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Chronicle Startups

Day 97 and Socializing Professionally

If you know me well then you know I’m not a natural people person. Despite being both an optimist about the human potential for progress and generally being a happy person, I think a lot of people suck. I know it’s a shitty outlook.

Maybe it’s because I just don’t have the energy for socializing. Big gatherings are not my thing, even though if you met me casually at a party you’d probably think I was an extrovert. If I’m putting my time aside for you it’s because I really enjoy it. The people I spend time with have to be great. They teach me something or have a unique point of view or have great emotional capacity. Most folks just don’t seem to enjoy putting themselves out there. Or maybe it’s that they simply don’t want to offend you so never really say anything of interest. I just don’t care what shit you bought or what your constantly over scheduled activities happen to be (though this has become less true in the pandemic).

I really don’t want to go back to socializing as a professional prerequisite. I hate having to tell people how I am. No one actually wants to know. I don’t really enjoy holding my tongue. Professional events generally require you to keep quiet about how much you think someone is bullshitting.

I’m often a huge hit on panels at conferences because I don’t give canned responses but wow does that make more polished people squirm. I once made the mistake of telling the truth at a Goldman Sachs retail conference. The analysts went wild. The poor CEO next to me looked like she wanted to die. It’s easy to tell when someone is using a script and talking points when the person next to them is just talking without a filter. Humans like truth and honesty it turns out.

I really hope we don’t go back to constant networking and prioritizing people who are naturally socializers. I hope the pandemic broke some of that tendency towards rewarding the constant parade of events, cocktails and ever more exclusive gatherings. But I’m sure there will be a massive correction where everyone loves real life experiences again. But once it reverts to the mean let’s all agree to be a little more judicious in our asks to “meet up” in the future. I’ll send you a Harry and David’s gift basket if we can continue to see less of each other.

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Chronicle

Day 94 and Moods

I got some great news today. All my most recent round of blood work came back in the healthy range. After several years of piss poor inflammatory markers I’m thrilled to see it getting back to normal. But I’m somehow I’m a foul mood for the day.

I talked to a friend about some exciting work we want to do together. It’s exactly the kind of work I’m looking to do in the future and their take on the problem is especially creative. But somehow I’m in a foul mood.

It’s a beautiful Easter Day and I’ve done nothing but enjoyable activities. I went for a hike. Are a gorgeous meal made up of ingredients from our local dairy share and greens from the hydroponics we grew ourselves. But somehow I’m in a foul mood.

I can’t remotely pinpoint why I should feel angry or sad or in anyway negative and yet I’m just a half a step off from the reality of my life today. Not even a viral tweet is doing anything to cheer me. And I usually love dopamine hits. I only had one minor setback in the whole day. I wasn’t looking at a timer and I had a gaming account get zeroed (it will cost a little money to rebuild). Ironically the last time this happened was over Christmas. Apparently holy days and games are a poor mix. But that shouldn’t account for a mood.

I guess some days are just moods. But I’ve got some nachos and tomorrow is another day. I bet I’ll be happy tomorrow.

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Aesthetics Chronicle Internet Culture Media

Day 87 and Information Processing

I occasionally enjoy dropping a deliberately provocative tweet just to see where people will land on rorsach wordings. I particularly like ones that can be read depending on your place in cultural issues haven’t reached consensus. which is exactly why people get angry. I did this on a whim yesterday asking “is listening to audiobooks reading?”

About 70% of folks said yes. 30% said no. But the reasons why were fascinating. The majority probably doesn’t care about semantics (the minority do which I will get to) but a good chunk cares about the connotations associated with how we learn or retain information. Mostly as a function of diversity and inclusion as many folks find reading to be inaccessible for reasons of neurodivergence or focus.

I relate as I don’t process audio easily so prefer subtitles and transcripts. Sometimes I feel bad about this as folks occasionally moralize about the value of mediums I don’t find accessible. There are plenty of things that I can’t engage with or experience in its original form because of disability. I’m just not particularly angry about it. But I am also left with all of the high prestige ways of consuming culture and none of the lowbrow. Like bummer I don’t have podcasts but I still have Dostoyevsky

That’s ultimately the interesting point about asking if reading and listening are similar. What do we consider to be higher processing? And does that matter? Some folks definitely moralized on the issue on. It’s sides. If you retain the information who cares how you got it. And accessibility is its own value. Pop culture is arguably more important because of its accessibility. This is why memes are folk art. They produce a very low loss form of high meaning to content ratio

A third of folks wanted about the definition used. A lot of semantics of information consumption. If you fall into the camp of caring about how we discuss information processing there is an amazing book called the Alphabet and the Goddess: The Conflict between Word and Image about the transition from image to binary communication and the changes in our neurological structures by a surgeon called and Leonard Schlain.

Like the actual debate about what types of processing is happening and how it affects our structures is worth having. But so much of Twitter boils down to the moral scolds and the rage woke fighting over ideas of worth and assigning value and status. I’d rather discuss how our minds process and that impacts the trajectory of our civilizations.