Tag: Silicon Valley

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Startups

Day 1091 and Do What You Love

I am feeling relaxed. This feeling has eluded me for nearly a week as the race to Christmas holidays left me mostly feeling sick and in pain.

I was getting tension headaches from the long hours and stress of the last two months of work. In an attempt to improve my muscular skeletal compensatory issues, I triggered a “this gets worse before it gets better” healing crisis. While my C1 and C2 upper spine feels much better, every other connected system was also contorted to accommodate the problem. It’s a bit of an adjustment.

But I slept a solid ten hours last night and I managed to get several naps in the past few days. By the time I made it to my first working session today after Christmas, I was ready to enjoy my work again. There is no finer pleasure to be found in startup life than a team you enjoy working with.

I am lucky that I do what I love. It doesn’t feel much like work to help founders you admire take action. The limber approach of answering to your best judgement is a joy. A startup dynamic that’s productive can feel as if you are intaking information and updating your prior working models at a rapid clip. And if you are lucky see results from your actions. It’s invigorating

I hope I feel a bit better and more rested as the week rolls on as I’d like to do a 2023 roundup but my priorities remain the work and my health so what gets done will be ordered as such. I hope everyone has work that engages them thusly.

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Community

Day 1085 and Openness

I make a living pricing risk. I do that through investment but also a few highly specialized skills I deploy on behalf of founders of startups.

The shortest articulation is that I am very good at spotting subcultures and helping them come into the mainstream and find a market that will pay them.

Not all markets are liquid and lots of arbitrage happens between types of capital. Sometimes a culture doesn’t survive contact with the mainstream. Sometimes that’s not a bad thing if the culture can’t self police.

There have been three core subcultures that make up my world and have been core to the history of the American west. Hippies, hackers and hipsters. I contain bits of each. I made an early career in prestige industries like media, fashion, and cosmetics (hipster) but I was born into a Silicon Valley family (hackers) and raised by a counterculture mother (hippies).

I’ve got that particular syncretic experience that so typifies “Grey Tribe” as our values have often been at odds with institutional power but we are perfectly fine with wider coordination mechanisms being chosen at different levels of abstraction. This is fancy speak for we like markets but don’t seek them for every problem as trust is a personal choice.

I am feeling as if the openness of my tribes is under attack because signaling mechanisms are breaking down. Seeing bad behavior is always upsetting. Lots of groups are seeing enemies on all sides and sociopaths seeking power. It’s a bit depressing. All of the nodes of our network need to do a better job at signaling that some risks are unacceptable. You need to maintain openness but not so open your capacity to judge risk is affected.

Categories
Politics

Day 1076 and The Encryption Wars

I’ve been exploring historical American attempts at regulation of computing as part of my #FreedomToCompute effort. We have an excellent example from the Clinton era which are colloquially called the Encryption Wars.

This campaign might be instructive as we decide what kind of regulatory climate might best foster machine learning and artificial intelligence innovation globally as well as what might to the best defense protections for individuals and groups who wish to work productively with approaches like inference databases and large language models.

This overview of the pressure campaign against encryption and the ultimate triumph of strong encryption rights in Slate illustrates how we very nearly made privacy much harder to preserve in America. Note that Slate is a very liberal publication but wrote the piece in 2015. A very different era of liberal policy making.

That’s why the key takeaway from the conflict is that weakening or undermining encryption is bad for the U.S. economy, Internet security, and civil liberties—and we’d be far better off if we remembered why the Crypto Wars turned out they way they did, rather than repeating the mistakes of the past

Slate

This piece included a number of negative consequences from reducing encryption in exported products which eventually undermined our own national security interests in protecting citizen’s own privacy. A lesson we continued to learn the hard way in the middle aughts Patriot Act “war on terror” era.

It’s worth skimming a review of the era from ChatGPT.

Silicon Valley played a crucial role in lobbying for encryption during the late 1990s. Tech companies and privacy advocates, realizing the importance of secure communication, actively opposed government attempts to restrict encryption. They argued that strong encryption was essential for protecting user privacy, fostering e-commerce, and ensuring the security of digital communications.

In response to this pressure, the Clinton administration began to reevaluate its stance on encryption. In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Executive Order 13026, which relaxed export restrictions on encryption products. This marked a shift towards recognizing the importance of strong encryption for both national security and the technology industry.

ChatGPT synopsis

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Community Finance Startups

Day 1070 and Allocating Personal Capital

As part the part of Twitter called TPOT comes into its own power the topic of resource allocation and how to route projects to sources of capital game up with Brooke Bowman of VibeCamp. It is a key question for Network State like entities that will need to navigate social ties.

I want to share how I do it as I’ve rooted some amount of capital across very different communities. I do it with some sets of intuitions I’ve gained from existing in a very powerful network of interests that are “The Silicon Diaspora” which is a syncretic coalition.

Much of it comes down to very specific context of what others are looking for in terms of outcomes. Investors with a specific thesis are much easier to work with for this reason. I try to express mine clearly at chaotic.capital and express myself actively through revealed preferences. I assume nothing is personal & everyone is working with some amount of emotional reactivity as it’s a human business.

A lot of it comes down to knowing who is a node in your network that can redirect it to someone who believes their resources can see a good return on their goals that are varying levels of abstract and personal. Skills and passions vary and this is good. It’s a mix of social capital, actual capital, and attention and it’s a giant game of inference

Some folks very good nodes and quite open to a range of different types of projects. Sometimes it’s just as simple as asking if they know someone who knows someone. I see a lot that isn’t in my own thesis but it’s in my own interest to pass it to others for whom it might be. The ecosystem approach has maximum strength when it’s played as a multi-agent pro-social game.

Also you almost never know someone’s full history so taking any reaction super personally is something I find to be too much for my own emotions. And I know a lot of history so if I can’t do it I try to make the presumption others can’t either. Be kind but clear.

That helps avoid a lot of accidental feuds that otherwise can ignite if you try to be delicate. I find transparent assessments of my own incentives goes a long way if I express it as part of my own reason for aligning. This is how I’ve worked with communities as diverse as back to the land doomers and crypto futurists to effective acceleration.

This is a fancy way of saying I don’t think “gossip” aka information sharing is actually bad but part of the empathy process of understanding what people want to work on and pay attention to in how they marshal their capital. You intake the values of your coalition and find shared ground. You keep their confidences by expressing collective goals. I try not to overweight my goals in that process. You have to do what’s right knowing outcomes are uncertain.

Showing you understand their context, their fears and their reputations concerns helps you. An act we denigrate in popular culture actually helps you to deepen the relationships as each signifier breaks down space between two people and builds trust. So don’t knock gossip. It has evolutionary, societal and individual benefit. Just remember the ultimate outcome is about bringing people closer.

Day 146 Gossip

I believe we are in an era where individuals can exercise significantly more agency because of the high leverage nature of the tools available to us. We owe much of this to information access and that is a wide coalition of people who are exercising basic freedoms to self determine because of this march of technology.

It’s my belief that freedom to compute is freedom of speech and these digital communities represent what I hope is more effective self governance through decentralization. We must build up the social trust amongst each other by showing we value each other’s interests. I believe this to be the right thing to do for each other. It’s the human thing too.

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Aesthetics Community Internet Culture Startups

Day 1066 and Behind The Scenes of Thousand Scenes Flourishing

We are living in an era of competing totalizing narratives. We assign Jungian archetypes and monomyths to complicated people and complex situations with many variables.

We ship relationships and stan fandoms even as the meme message is that we should be shipping code and forming bonds with other people with agency.

Remember that hyperstition is about bringing a reality into being. We have agency to impact the world we live in. We have more control than ever and anyone can get leverage.

I’m so inspired to see how many communities are facing an uncertain future head on. Sure we’ve had schisms and it’s easy to judge someone else’s sincere revivalism with crass cynicism.

I prefer an optimism about what we can all accomplish when we compete to serve a need better than anyone else. I like specialization as the more knowledgeable that is dispersed widely beyond a priest cast the better we seem to do as a species. A whole world of people is calling to you to own more of the future personally.

You may wonder what you can contribute. And sure some actors are massively more agentic. I never thought I’d be in that rare class and yet I can contribute meaningful to dozens of aligned projects. It’s important to avoid dickriding. Don’t make up stories about your betters. Or at least try not to believe them.

You can be personally better yourself. You can accelerate. Now is the time to arm yourself with leverage as the world shifts. Be wary of messiahs and mercenaries but also know action is expensive.

Strong organizations have healthy value memetics. “Just Do It” frames a broader truth that humans take in a context of millions of other agents. Action is disproportionally powerful when people just play their role.

I fight nihilism. I’m not eager for the end of humanity or our civilizations. I want our flourishing. But neither am I attached to a static vision of my humanity or yours. In the image of God gives quite a bit of latitude for our species’ evolution.

Categories
Internet Culture Startups

Day 1062 and Just Go

I’m writing this as I wait to board an airplane from Bozeman to San Francisco International. In the spirit of taking more actions I am applying more acceleration to my own daily life. If you’d like to discuss e/acc #FreedomToCompute I’ll be around in the city and you can expect to see me at some events.

It feels unusual just hopping on an airplane. It was a behavior that I took for granted in pre-pandemic life. The golden age for the early adopter consumer internet and the low interest rate phenomenon of the post Global Financial Crisis meant I could hop a flight from NYC to SFO and arrange an Airbnb or HotelTonight while in the security line.

It’s a little more challenging now if you don’t come out of the last cycle with a few wins. And judging by the fullness of the flight and its demographics others are seeing San Francisco as the center of a lot of activity in making sure they win the future.

Leaning into the future coming fast is a consensus view. Everyone is contesting space and the virtual world of the global internet is a powerful constituency. It’s just important to remember that even as we’ve mediated a lot with these tools sometimes you have to validate in person. Humans are just wired that way.

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Internet Culture Politics Startups

Day 1058 and Battle Plans

The sense of anger, frustration and disappointment in Silicon Valley startup circles over the current regulatory mess around artificial intelligence and compute limits is intense. #FreedomToCompute is resonating.

As with any new technology there are invested interests, naysayers, panicking and paranoia. Which would be enough to make us remember past battles over encryption and privacy. This time we’ve got the cherry on top of existential risk.

While I agree that artificial intelligence is a technology that will have many risks, I tend to think of them as of the more quotidian types like algorithmic bias. We cannot allow incumbent powers to centralize a new technology that can and should benefit us all.

Math and computing power are as essential as speech. In today’s world, they ARE speech. We may speak in natural language, but the way we extend ourselves, build things, and grow as a species is through our tools. Computation is a tool.

We oppose all attempts to restrict computational power and envision a world where we all have the right to build whatever we can dream.

#FreedomtoCompute Julie Fredrickson

Categories
Internet Culture Politics

Day 1056 and Freedom to Compute

We must start a #FreedomtoCompute movement based on the idea that access to computing power is a fundamental right.

Math and computing power are as essential as speech. In today’s world, they ARE speech. We may speak in natural language, but the way we extend ourselves, build things, and grow as a species is through our tools. Computation is a tool.

We oppose all attempts to restrict computational power and envision a world where we all have the right to build whatever we can dream.

The incumbent power is always going to try and keep disruptive and democratizing power out of the hands of the populace

Math & computer power are as essential as speech. Imagine if the first amendment had been frozen in time at the printing press and didn’t protect the internet.

We cannot accept permanently lowered standards of fundamental rights

Categories
Startups

Day 1055 and Shipping

All of startup world has spent the last few days wrapped up in the drama of OpenAI and why the board fired Sam Altman.

A theory I’d like to float (seriously but not literally) is that we are in the middle of a massive scissor statement war between “acceleration” and “deceleration” and we’ve assigned Jungian archetype champions & simple “just so” stories to the players.

There is very little nuance when you seek to find meaning in a situation by narrative alone. Recall that divide and conquer is an effective control technique and Silicon Valley is finding it must choose sides. Perhaps this is by design.

Everyone is overthinking this whole OpenAI debacle. The real explanation has been staring is the face for weeks.

Be concerned, be very very concerned.

Bojan Tunguz
I expect AI to be capable of superhuman persuasion well before it is superhuman at general intelligence, which may lead to some very strange outcomes

I think the “super” human part is how super stupid we are as a species when it comes to smoothing narratives and hero worship. We are easily persuaded by stories we recognize. This meme summed it up nicely.

Memes are just 21st century Jungian archetypes.

If you had an artificial intelligence trained on every single biography, history & public relations campaign in written history (let’s entertain the notion Altman did) wouldn’t this hijacking of narratives & assigning of fables be what it would do?

The vibes of Silicon Valley were checked. To make a joke about all the fan fiction we’ve collectively co-written on social media, we shipped the marriage of e/acc and Sam Altman. We shipped Altman and Brockman as loyal cofounder technology brothers in arms fighting for acceleration.

We told stories and made heroes and villains of the two narratives. Even though many of the factions in e/acc absolutely had criticized the regulatory capture approach of OpenAI. But once it was a choice between acceleration and deceleration sides were chosen.

When it was presented as a binary choice most chose a side on this easily. Acceleration is better on average than deceleration. I believe that too.

I have a lot of caveats and nuance in that choice, as I bet most people who work in artificial intelligence and Silicon Valley probably do. Yes change is hard and no change is without risk. Time marches on.

If it’s one or the other, sometimes people get irreparably split off entirely by the scissor. Be skeptical of this. Don’t separate yourself from people you know to be of good faith and conscience.

The only way we achieve anything is by doing the other kind of shipping. Ship your code, ship your product, make things and get feedback from people. Hero worship and archetypal battles don’t matter as much as taking action in your own life. Build things for yourself and for other people. That’s a human goal.

Categories
Media Startups

Day 1051 and Wild Speculation

My timeline got absolutely imploded by the news that Sam Altman has been fired by the board of OpenAI. I’ve got so many priors and biases and you probably can guess at some of them. Others I hope I’ve played a little closer to the chest. I do not know what happened.

Everyone in Silicon Valley is going Matthew McConaughey paranoid smoking conspiracies

I do think we’d know more about what the fuck was going if we had the kind of reporting that was a little more shoot from the hip and a little less tsk tsk regime. I’ve never missed Valleywag more.

I do think it’s been an impossibly weird week and everyone is as reactive as it is possible to be. Silicon Valley has always had factions and drama and the Federal government breathing down its neck. So this feels like a little bit of the same cycle of power and drama that we’ve always had. No one is ever an angel and the devils are often unexpected. It’s best not to make a martyr out of mercenaries. Just don’t be too sure you know what army you’ve been drafted into.