Tag: Social Capital

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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.

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Community

Day 1065 and Agency

I consider it a positive that the topic of having agency is having a resurgence in many communities with diverse worldviews. The one throughline is that we can shape our world no matter how hopeless odds may seem. All we can do as humans is try to make tomorrow better than today. Optimism has many flavors.

There are many ways you may personally find your own locus of control in your own life. And by locus of control I simply mean tangible things over which you have actual control.

Up don’t mean “monitoring the situation” though I myself doomscroll plenty. I mean deciding that you can impact something by making it happen. You own a thing. Maybe it’s only a small radius over which you have impact. Maybe it’s broad and narrow. Markets have lots of niches for everyone.

I myself take comfort in leaning into what I can do with my skills. And my skills are unique. I am specialized but also don’t mind learning something new. I try to cultivate what they call a high degree of openness. Even though I’m not sure if always do. I trust my capacity to change when believe I can lean on others if I show myself to be capable of delivering in small ways within my specialities. Coordination brings about trust over time.

Don’t assume your betters or the “men in the arena” or someone in charge will handle it. Maybe you are the one who can fix the problem. Maybe you have seen something no one else has.

It’s also possible you are wrong. Don’t be insulted if you need to prove yourself. You should expect others to prove themselves too. Strong networks forward along information to others who show themselves to be trust worthy.

So don’t be tempted to look down on anyone’s choices. We’ve all got to balance human needs which have limits and human wants which are infinite. Not everyone is going to be happy. But we can do our part to own what is real in our own world. Reality is a collective project.

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Culture

Day 1060 and Bullying

Have you ever been bullied? I gather it’s a common experience. I am not sure if I was bullied much as a child. It’s possible I was but I think it’s equally possible I have always had enough social power that I could have been a bully myself.

I do know I was raised on stories about the importance of standing up to the powerful and fighting for the weakest. If you saw someone being taken advantage of in a situation it was your obligation to render aid. I assume these stories hindered any inclination to bully myself but I can’t be sure.

At this point in my life I struggle with whether to believe my ego and its narratives about dominance and power. Any stories I might have about being a victim to circumstances have to contend with the objective reality of how well my life has gone.

I feel it would be dishonest to suggest I’m not powerful. And I don’t feel as if I was unduly dominated or coerced by others in my younger years. Maybe I’m wrong.

A common story seems to be the intelligent suffering abuse from the stupid but powerful. Maybe I didn’t experience this because I was a woman.

I knew I was intelligent but it was not a hindrance. I don’t know if that’s a typical experience. Lots of intelligent people seem to experience social discrimination from those with status and standing that are insecure about their own intelligence. I was only ever treated well for being intelligent.

I suppose I’m thinking about bullying, intelligence and dominance because the current moment in artificial intelligence is focused on whether or not intelligence is what makes the difference in civilization and its progress.

I dont assign a ton of value to raw intelligence because so many other factors matters to humans. We are social pack animal. Plenty of idiots hold power and plenty of very intelligent people can barely feed themselves. But if folks who have taken IQ tests want to feel superior I can’t really blame them. I feel superior for all kinds of random non-factors like my taste and my hobbies. It doesn’t mean I am superior.

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Aesthetics Culture

Day 1053 and Revivalism

You’ve gotta have faith.

I am a little surprised to find myself discussing what appears to be a genuine revivalist movement from all walks of life.

“This particular corner of Twitter” is neo-Shakerism. The singularity is always coming is coming for the computer nerds. The rationalists are pitted against futurists. Steely realists admit to having woo sensibilities about the nature of reality.

But we are also being subjected to surprisingly archetypal forms of the hero’s journey in every single news story and social media narrative at alarmingly rapid rate. A rational man is going to want to wag the dog. We do a little kayfabe. The crowd cheers its hero.

But also mere men are elevated to strange statuses. You can believe in a cause but be unsure of the martyrs and mercenaries that fight for it. I feel like if you were really that horny for the Roman Empire you’d have more dates handy on Caesars and the savior and be a little less focused on the Gladiators and the bread and circus.

But we’ve got people who can conjure fire and this time it’s not priests but machine learning engineers who write fan fiction about British Boarding schools that are in charge. The biggest dork you know gets to summon God. It’s not that irrational to worry we’ve summoned elder gods isn’t the of the divine right? Folk stories have some meaning right?

And like sure Bayesian inferences says maybe you should worship a Flying Spaghetti Monster. I say watch out for those Babylon death culture memetics because we didn’t have the right inference field about the sun for most of history. The trickster god can be summoned as sure as the devil. Lets remember information hygiene was not good for most of history so it paid to have some prejudices.

Nevertheless the worship of men has gods has generally been iffy. And so, and I can’t entirely explain it as evidenced by the rambling writing in doing this weekend, but the hive mine of the Internet feels like a real team effort at controlling popular opinion about the arrival of the promised land.

And sure I have recency bias. While I was in Amsterdam for the Network State Conference I was missing a gathering of what amounts to Christian hippie revivalists. Another node of my network that m feels adjacent to both technology and culture was at a Catholic divinity school in Washington D.C. Meanwhile my feed makes whisper jokes of mystery cults and computational power. Worship is powerful. I’ve talked to all sorts of rationalists into new forms of woo and, magic. We speak of queens and divas and witches. Everyone is sure that something is coming and they feel the divine.

It’s within these networks of social organization and belief where I see clashes of power and organization. There are political theorists and economists contending with what a centralized higher authority might do make for more efficient resource allocation. Appeal to authority! We have any number of radical thinkers who are essentially rogue elements of human consensus who are if they seized with a little bit of “agreed on common good” we can revolutionize how we do resource allocation. Central planning is so scientific. Tith!

I feel a little bit like the drama of everyone having access to social media has made us all participate in elaborate fan fictions about who moves the world. I see all over my timeline Zoomers staning over Schopenhauer and Heidegger and Kant as if they were secret movers of history. And they are.

We’ve got a genre of signalling on the internet where if you find a theorist whose mother wrote a nasty letter to him for being socially awkward you’d get people discussing general trauma dumping. Did you understand that? I’m sorry to say you have brain worms and you’ve been trained on a steady diet of rebellion and empire. Be safe out there.

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Aesthetics Finance

Day 1040 and Easier To Be First

I was telling a friend of mine, only somewhat hyperbolically, that I’d watched “Margin Call” forty times just this year. The actual number is probably half a dozen (my blog’s search function tells me I’ve mentioned it fifteen times) but it’s still a lot for what was a niche drama about the financial crisis.

There is a speech given by Jeremy Irons that sums up perfectly why finance and fashion are fundamentally in the same business.

What have I told you since the first day you stepped into my office? There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first; be smarter; or cheat. Now, I don’t cheat. And although I like to think we have some pretty smart people in this building, it sure is a hell of a lot easier to just be first.

Being first is my game. I’ve taken it from a career in luxury fashion to a career to a career in venture capital. It’s the same fucking job.

It means I often look stupid as I see emerging trends long before the rest of the market gets there. There is a basic math to this which involves status signaling. If you are the type who must do the math to understand how status works as it’s not intuitive to you I recommend this piece.

Just remember that being first is the key to both. And your ability to be first is almost entirely a function of cool. And being cool means not giving a fuck. And if you don’t give a fuck its generally for one of two reasons. Its either because you have the status to do and can get away with it or or you genuinely don’t care.

Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.

Janis Joplin

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Internet Culture Startups

Day 1036 and The Right Direction

I’ve been in Europe for the last month. My itinerary included Tallinn, Helsinki and Amsterdam. It was a personal trip with work overlayed on top as the digital nomad as become a regular part of my life.

I have said it before but I don’t take as much pleasure as you might imagine from these trips. Much of the reason I spend so much time outside of America is simply that the State department won’t let in the kind of rare weirdo digital grey tribe talent from the portions of the world the United States has labeled as “bad passports.”

I’ve written about it extensively if you are interested. We’ve reached a crisis point in the dysfunction of our immigration and travel visa system in America and it weighed heavily on me and mine. It’s the most concrete evidence I have that America simply isn’t serious about being competitive in the global economy.

As I head back home to the states, I want to be sure I’m heading in the right direction with my priorities. I’ve been committed to crypto for close to a decade now. I’ve added in more focus as it’s become clearer we can’t rely on fiat and the dollar system. I’ve become part of the artificial intelligence explosion over the last two years. Now that the Network State concept is more formalized and we have rallying movements like e/acc, I feel as if some optimism is cautiously warranted. All it will take is twenty or thirty years of work and surviving the geopolitical tumult. No big deal right?

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Aesthetics Culture

Day 1028 and Mimicry In The Age of High Variance

Do you recall a time when you “looked up to someone?” I mean this in the genuine possibly naive sense of admiration, not the specific act of being shorter than someone and looking up to meet their gaze.

As 5’3” female I’m basically always looking up. Alas I’ve found that genuine admiration is in much shorter supply in my adulthood than I was led to believe it would be as a child.

I’m sure some of this is the cynicism of my old age, but it’s hard not to notice the impacts of institutional distrust and 24/7 social media on admiration.

We know too much and it’s become harder to forget that homo sapians are irrational hypocritical reactive mammals whose our biology & culture engages us in nearly constant status seeking social games.

Sure you can blame Instagram for making us shallow mimics of prestige and power, but I’d bet your average anthropologist would be happy to walk you through the evolution of simian social dynamics. We’ve always been this way.

The additional complication is that we’ve come to expect more social mobility even as the gap between plebian and aristocrat has seemingly widened. Not that those terms have any static meaning. We no longer have strict birthright nobility as power has become more intertwined with economic power.

Nevertheless it would seem we expect, through such cultural innovations as the American Dream and capitalism, to have a chance at becoming high status ourselves.

It’s no wonder we struggle to find admiration when we see even the least impressive among us are rewarded with baffling sums of wealth, power and prestige. The term influencer is loaded for a reason.

And so our youth are despondent and depressed and our elites venal and sinful. The variance in personal outcomes has never seemed less socially satisfying. What do you mimic if the outcomes on display on your algorithms are at once impossible to achieve and derived from seemingly meaningless actions? I honestly don’t fucking know. You will have to figure that out for yourself now.

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Culture Politics

Day 1025 and Petit Aristocracy

A swirling milieu of discourse has brought a renewed focus in my inbox & timeline on what constitutes the pursuit of excellence; that old Socratic dichotomy of the individual human’s personal virtues and his role as citizen in the wider communal project of civilization. The tensions have never felt so taut to me.

Please forgive my focus on revanchist populism, but the good of the many versus the singular hero is a subject of fascination for both fascists and socialists alike. Costin Alamariu has set the warrior master return traditionalists on fire as he’s come out from under his nom de plume Bronze Age Pervert with a complex overview of the tyrannical Athenian philosopher kings and their cultivation (yes he means eugenics) of antiquity’s aristocracy.

The Marxists are just as loud. We’ve got authoritarian leaning proletarian sympathizers assessing a Marxist history of “progressive” American Wilsonian industrial fascism. And yes you will believe its philosophical impact on German National socialist ideology.

Everywhere I look, we are all debating whose rules matter, from Nature to God to man, and how we should use that authority to determine how we organize. It’s a bit surprising to see intelligentsia overcome with fervor for the proletariat and the aristocracy when you’d imagine both classes look back with disdain at the academic class.

It’s a ping ponging back and forth between the individual and his wider group responsibilities to his people from every ideological direction.

I see it in Luke Burgis and Freddie DeBoer’s concern with mimetic collapse and the recursive artistic malaise. If our system produces no truly novel art is it a failure of our elites to pursue excellence? Is it among our elites where genius and high culture produced? Or is it the opposite? Do we seek out frontiers when pushed from the boundaries of those who build and work?

Noah Smith weighed in on the extropian enthusiasm of our technical class for acceleration. The bourgeoise middle class of mercantilism has evolved to engineering and information technology to drive resource allocation.

As a post enlightenment matter, a petit aristocracy of the technical bourgeois is the most balanced of the positions between the masses yearning to be free and recognition of a desire for leadership earned through meritocracy lending a guiding hand.

As a journalist, Noah Smith is coming from a more intelligentsia orientation but the message of progressive futurism is coming from the patrician side as well. A venture capitalist like Marc Andreessen might not see himself as an elite aristocrat, coming as he did from humble beginnings, but he’s the standard barer for the titan class advocating for technological accelerationism.

I’ll fully admit to a personal bias for techno-optimism and effective accelerationism. But it could simply be self serving. Venkatash Rao thinks this mass discourse on individual versus collective responsibility is simply a whole new cope for an entangled world in disequilibrium.

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Aesthetics

Day 1007 and Half A Decade Past Premium Mediocrity

I recall somewhat fondly the era of capitalism in which moving your business online was an innovation. The direct to consumer phase of retail and packaged goods is forever tightly tied to interest rates in my mind. Direct to consumer failed as an ethos and a movement for better goods for consumers.

Facebook, Google and Apple are engaged in brutal turf warfare over who owns customer data and let me tell you it isn’t the brands or you as the buyer that benefit.

What was once efficient in reaching ever wider and more specific audiences, the consumer internet has smoothed your identity into some brand’s extremely specific Pyschographic. You know what I mean when I was Lululemon girl and Black Rifle Coffee guy. Don’t worry you think, I’m not a sucker. While typing this on an iPhone.

There was a vague optimism that merely by doing something like bypassing superfluous luxuries like brands (which only served to bamboozle with flash and expense) you could provide a better quality product at a lower cost to your ultimate customer. How naive that seems at the speed of global derivatives based financial products.

How fondly I remember thinking someone could design the Platonic ideal of the tee shirt or provide some basic ultimate end good without confusing merchandising tactics. I’ve never once in my life wanted to decide if the X or ultra version of something was better. Just sell me the one good thing damn it.

But they can’t. Markets compete. The differentiation gets competed away eventually. It began with the “one essential good thing” in a category and ended as a mess of optimization for margin & enshitification and selling new versions of the same audience to whatever sucker can pay the CPM. Remember when we used to pretend you could pay for performance in advertising? Sheryl Sandberg got us good.

There’s a weird thing with scale, where the market can raise the threshold for crappiness and then a truly scaled company can positively exploit those dynamics to provide a genuinely superior good. Amazon can have pretty great basics in the same way gas station chains can have decent coffee. Costco’s hotdog will remain an icon if their standards hold up.

Rory Sutherland an advertising executor has a concept called the “threshold for crappiness” that suggested your local chain sometimes had to up its game to compete when a chain comes in. But markets push downwards as well as upwards.

Venkatash Rao first coined premium mediocrity. Private equity excels at this category. It’s global cosmopolitan striver megabrand. It’s the pretty decent but in a big packaged good sort of way item you get at Whole Foods. Imagine the dreaded diffusion line of a once great luxury brand. Or Michael Kors.

Rao put words to a phenomena that drove me a bit nuts during the height of premium mediocrity in 20117. That was the tipping point for me when the shrinkflation of frothy times body slammed the aesthetic soul of branding.

Now the most mass market experience that is still tasteful and good can compete globally. But sometimes you just long to discover where a local market is genuinely better.

My favorite aspect of being abroad is finding markets where it’s not yet occurred & enjoying a significantly better product for it. It’s my most toxic millennial trait.

Legacy local businesses in small towns or secondary markets simply set a different standard for themselves occasionally from the premium mediocrity of the global markets. But times change. Business models change. Now we have ghost kitchens. And you two have probably purchased a premium mediocre brand and been fine with it.

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Startups

Day 1006 and Startup Towns

I was born in the startup Fertile Crescent of Silicon Valley. But I grew up outside of one of the many ecosystem towns. Boulder Colorado always took pride in not only its technical roots in aerospace and defense, but in its new software startups as well.

I admire people that build out a startup ecosystem. Understanding that a certain environment of agency breeds good outcomes. Maybe it’s a kind of boom town mentality in the good years. But in any year it’s good to be on the team that believes in the future. It feels as if people are pulling in the same direction.

I get the sense that Tallinn as a city and Estonia in general as a country believe in a better future. I can’t tell you how much I enjoy seeing a city with a lot of construction. Offices also appear to be full but there is also housing in the city core. Everyone seems to have kids. I’ve never seen more first graders in a city.

The gentleman I met today said that in the future every country will be competing for every global citizen. I think that insight is at the heart of believing in a better future. You have to believe that if you are talented that countries will rightly compete to have you as its citizen. The frontier of the future will be found in finding the optimistic folks who believe that their efforts will make their chosen place better.