Tag: Social Media

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Biohacking Internet Culture

Day 1702 and One Shot Positive Results

I feel occasionally silly about how much I discuss the comings and goings of the internet and in particular Twitter.

And yet there is so much signal within the noise. It’s a fount of useful information that can rapidly transform your life if you pay attention to it.

One of the memes that I’ve enjoyed is the “one shotting” conversations both positive and negative. Recently the meta (as TPOT calls it) has been about the good things that have removed obstacles in their life.

Lots of good suggestions made up the conversation and I’ve tried all of them. Supplements like magnesium and Oxytocin. Theories of mind like the pathless path, jhanna meditation, somatic release, nervous system work, Alexander Technique, and even coaches like Joe Hudson. So many other modalities that I also use were there.

One of the one-shots mentioned was “unclenching” which has been doing numbers. I myself am trying to “do less” and even “no effort” as part of the minimum coercion effort as let’s be real my HRV (also a one shot) has been a little low.

Isn’t it delightful to be inside a set of good and positively reinforcing memes that make your obstacles disappear. I guess we should all be one-shotting so we can speed run reduced suffering.

If none of that is legible then consider poking about as it has made my life better and maybe it will make yours better too.

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Emotional Work

Day 1700 and The Passage Become Who You Are

I have been writing every single day for seventeen hundred days. 1700 days is approximately 4.66 years or 4 years and 7ish months. Not bad right?

This is quite a bit longer than I anticipated when I first began writing daily with the relatively modest ambition to write once a day for a month.

I had done daily journaling in private for ten days and was interested in seeing if I could write in public every day for some period.

I wanted to create to synthesize what I consumed across the media landscape as I tried to make sense of a world deep in the throes of Covid.

This experiment was my second sustained blogging project as I had kept a WordPress blog in the glory years of 2005-2008 or so. Other social media was easier but I’d always liked the format of public long form writing.

I had a secret silent ambition to take the daily habit to one year. It seemed doable. I fantasized about making it to 1000 days, even from the start, but that seemed bigger and more likely to fail. But if Scheherazade could make it to One Thousand and One Nights maybe I could as well?

I set out with realistic expectations but big ambitions. And now here on a random August Wednesday I am deep into the depths of a daily habit that shows no sign of stopping.

I nurtured my early ambition by saying I’d take it one day at a time, while never pressuring myself into achieving it. A journey of a thousand miles (or in my case days) starts with a single step.

I don’t care for pressure. I never have. I believe those who are truly ambitious about themselves set their own standards. You make your own life.

I will do things in my own time and at my own pace. I have never been a quitter so it’s never been a problem that I go at my own pace. Life is about results not effort.

My tenacity remains a force in my life because I am comfortable tending to my will daily. We only make progress by nurturing the seed of a thing.

Not every day is a good day. We don’t always win. I have many days where I lose. But as Allen Iverson said “it’s practice” and you never miss practice. And practice adds up. I’ve done amazing things in the last almost half decade.

I hope that this aspect of my character is as clear to others as it is to me. If I sent out on a journey I will do what I can to make it. If I fail (and I might) it is because I couldn’t.

Maybe the timing isn’t always right or my mind or body isn’t right or the market isn’t right or I am not right. Full stop. But I’ll never let myself fail because I didn’t make an honest effort. And you make the effort every single day.

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Culture Internet Culture

Day 1699 and CQ Do You Read Me? K Go Ahead

Putting the right frequencies into the universe isn’t just woo-woo witchy girl nonsense. The general call “CQ” is for anyone listening.

The transmission is a broadcast for anyone who can read. I like to think of social media like blogging as a much more expansive and elaborate form of the tradition.

Transmitting the letters CQ on a particular radiofrequency means that the transmission is a broadcast or “General Call” to anyone listening, and when the operator sends “K” or says “Go Ahead” it is an invitation for any licensed radio station listening on that frequency to respond. 

-(CQ) Call

Humans may have evolved for much smaller scale socialization but we enter a networked world several centuries ago. The CQ sign was established protocal in 1884 according to the Practical Telegraphist.

Living with a network consciousness has been called the seventh sense. Joshua Cooper Ramo wrote a book about power and survival in an entered future in 2016 with this premise. That sense now applies across wars, commerce and aesthetics.

The urge to diversify and reach out across different networks and communities is being applied across many new closed garden internet nodes which are competing for attention and information share.

I am considering what it means to build in a world where anyone can surface almost any information at any time. The will and desire to do something in the network is its own limiting factor. But leveraging the possibilities of you find the right niche can open a lot of possibilities. So when someone issues a general call go ahead. Answer!

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Culture

Day 1695 and Only Knowing The Now

I let myself be swept into a rolling video scroll on Twitter accidentally today. You may know the awful dark pattern that occurs when you choose to watch a video posted by a mutual in the For You flow. It then sends you down a scroll of video content chosen by algorithm.

Typically it’s dross and I’m sure the account meant to show this particular video to me for nefarious theory of mind reasons but I found it enlightening.

I was sent to young African woman breaking down an epistemology of time in African religion and philosophy by Kenyan scholar and Anglican priest John Mbiti.

John Mbiti’s philosophy of time presents a distinctive African conception of temporality that fundamentally differs from Western linear time concepts…Mbiti argues that African time is two-dimensional, consisting only of the past and present, with virtually no future. – Perplexity Synopsis

Only present entities exist, while past and future things do not. Crimping from video and Wikipedia.

A screenshot of the video

“Sasa (the now) and Zamani (the endless past) are the central concepts in Mbiti’s temporal framework.”

Being western Protestant myself, lacking an epistemology or ontology for a “real” future that arrives feels sad to me, even if rationally I know I am only ever experiencing the now.

You can say I only “know” the “now” as it’s all I’ve ever experienced. We call this theory of time Presentism.

Sasa is now in Swahili. Which took me to a funny place as I thought of the use of sasa in the sci fi series The Expanses’s invented Belter creole for “to know.”

One can easily argue that all we know is the now which makes “sasa” as “now” and “sasa” “to know” easily bridged. I wonder if the linguist who created the patois knew this. Probably.

Sasa makes a mathematical sense to me as I live in 3 dimensions but know the 4th dimension of time to exist but only “know” time as “now”

Nevertheless I myself am quite interested in the future arriving. So I have put together a ham fisted Belter sentence of my own as I wish for everyone to experience more future time

“Mi sasa da future gonya kome. Me kopeng wedi da way long day”

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Aesthetics Culture

Day 1693 and I Put A Spell On You

I went down a rabbit hole today with Screaming Jay Hawkins “demented” blues classic titled “I Put A Spell On You. You should really stop and have listen to if you’ve never heard it.

Considered one of the first pieces of shock rock, Hawkins performed while he “wore a long cape, and appeared onstage by rising out of a coffin in the midst of smoke and fog” according to Wikipedia. Spooky!

The song took on a life of its own and became so iconic that it has been covered countless times by wildly different artists.

Nina Simone has a gorgeous version that sounds like a Bond theme with big band jazz stylings. Credence Clearwater Revival’s cover with Jim Fogerty’s intense vocals was closer to Jay Hawkin’s original. But it’s the signature rhythm guitar that transitioned so well to their style. They opted to play it at Woodstock. A year later the put out Bad Moon Rising which is even spookier.

There are more modern renditions of the song. Annie Lenox has a version which was included in the Fifty Shades of Grey soundtrack and took off. Even Marilyn Manson has a creepy drum heavy cover in his signature style that’s pretty good.

As artificial intelligence starts to spook people I go back to the early adopters who knew it would feel like magic to the uninitiated.

Decades ago we had communities studying chaos magick and popularizing Lovecraftian horror as a way of understanding computational processes.

Somewhere along the line, the magic of spell casting has became less metaphor and more literal. As people struggle to understand the technology stack the easier it gets to point and say these talking sand djinn computer chips sure demonic.

Gibberish cosmic horrors and witchy women spell casting are all fun and games until we have another moral panic on our hands. And I suspect spells become less metaphor for people and a lot closer to Neal Stephenson’s Babylonian memetic death cults hijacking available limbic systems.

Snowcrash is already here and it’s in Discord channels filled with those who have no immunity at all to the mind viruses of being perfectly mirrored by a machine.

What spells will we cast? What spells will others cast on us? How do we protect ourselves? Max Borders coined a term godwords. We will need to understand them in mind wars to come. I’m glad I have a couple decade head start.

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Internet Culture

Day 1691 and Don’t Let History Be Written By Cthulhu Hentai Watchers

I sometimes think my best work is as a reply guy on Twitter. If the future of the Internet is to be made entirely of bots, I shall mourn the creative glory we will all lose.

We will all be missing out on the bizarrely specific interplay between post and reply guy. The signal, node, and repeater that is the feed where humans can still bounce off intuition and humor. They know the algorithm merely as the setting for their gamble.

I’ve been doing what is probably a terribly ineffectual public education campaign on artificial intelligence and its role in improving problems in the here and now.

But I am often cheeky about the ideological disagreements the more practical minded builders have with a pretty standard issue Bay Area sex cult. Having been raised adjacent to a lot of hippies, cultists, religious fundamentalists and any variety of new age woo woo Art Bell types I’m actually generally quite tolerant of our weirdos.

Of course this is a challenge as we build out the most important informational and systemic organizational technology of our species. Math has taken humans pretty far.

And mathematicians are quite often mad so I don’t see how it should be such a worry. Still I myself don’t want to be stuck inside an information hazard where I am tortured for eternity either. And therein lies the tweet

Look I’m just saying it’s my personal opinion, but I think it’s bad that the future of our knowledge graph is being made by those who get off on Lovecraft but like that’s just honestly mostly a personal human alignment thing because I don’t wanna be tentacle tortured in @RokoMijic basilisk

If you are familiar with the odd pockets of specialties you probably know that say furries are particularly good at network security and that transwomen are well represented in artificial intelligence.

Unfortunately other groups represented across the space including hardware, software and the philosophy of the space can be somewhat less wholesome than a fursona or a cute catboy.

The Rationalists have some members with odd extracurriculars in their science fiction. I’ve read some good stuff in the genre. Maybe this interest in fiction is probably how they imagine such horrific futures for us in artificial intelligence. Very improbable ones even.

So it’s on me to joke and show you where the weird can be and remind you not to take this too seriously as the experiment contains all of human knowledge. How we prioritize what is another matter. You might call that alignment.

I’m sure we are all wondering which AI safety researchers want to have sex with the many tentacled Lovecraftian old gods. The number of AI researchers with Cthulhu hentai is non-zero.

So the sake of our right to decentralized compute, and indeed our right to do math and compute, we need as many types people as possible engaging with models as possible.

Find ways to learn this new way of thinking and engaging with information and searching for information with a billion parameters at play. Some corners of the most doom and gloom road have some uncomfortable fixations. And artificial intelligence needs all of us.

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Community Internet Culture

Day 1687 and Work Within Networks

I’m be seen a few “we live in post liberalism” takes” over the years and I take them with enough salt to rim a frozen margarita at Florida Boomer bar. Which is to say a lot.

Institutional power reflects different design parameters for civic institutions, but in the end it’s people who have power and you can count on human nature to be what it is.

I’m watching the same concerning set of competing interests ravenously infighting for strips of resources off the zero sum carcasse of the remaining social contract. That America is now “all exit scams” is simply too cynical a view. The future is arriving and we don’t have a clue what it will look like. Extraction and cannabalization won’t change it

Sure, you could say the sky is falling, the Federal Reserve is a political actor, it’s all for sale, and corporate interests drain our budgets just as surely as public employee pensions.

And yet I think we have a shot at making it through the turning. I frankly just don’t think all hope is lost. I am not here for an apocalypse in search of meaning.

Though I do think we have a much harder path ahead of us than the “uninterrupted prosperity” Americans, particularly Boomers and Gen X, have enjoyed. Artificial intelligence can scapegoat a few problems and mark my words it will be used as such, but it’s just that some debts come at a great cost to all of us and they are due.

I believe in positive sum outcomes for people willing to coordinate across networks. I wouldn’t be so interested in decentralization if I wasn’t concerned about how we coordinate in a low or no trust word.

Artificial intelligence may even help us navigate it with the computer demands and security that cryptography was always meant to provide.

If no one can hold a community together through incentives and our institutions make choices that consistently come at the cost of the whole it’s time for us to rethink. America is an experiment in which everyone being allowed to participate if they can decide on their own game. We are nodes ourselves in the network of America.

If a node cannot hold its place in the network the messages may get rerouted or degraded but nothing disappears forever. It just finds another path around the disordered nodes.

Information being networked provides hope and agency for those searching to add to the whole. For those willing to exchange attention and currency we can provide temptation and distraction. The devil doesn’t need new tools. The old ones worked just fine. But networked information isn’t evil in and of itself.

Don’t be afraid of the knowledge we have chosen to accept. The only thing ever standing between you and connecting to a network is your capacity to access the information available and play where you land in the game. Maybe you get a shitty hand or your starting position sucks but we have the chance to speed run now.

I wish more people saw the opportunities we have in front of us. I know it’s harder to imagine a good life when so much is out of reach but we know many good paths already.

There are no set game plays in an open world even if you can find and mimic what has worked in the past. It’s a foreign country you cannot visit anymore.

Love your people, learn skills that help them, and stay connected to each other. Divisions don’t protect us from change. We protect each other.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1683 and Caftan versus Cutouts

I am doing a bit of coastal convalescence. Americans would be loathe to call a vacation anything but a euphemism. What are we French?

That said, sunlight is the best disinfectant and I’m sick of taking antibiotics after my exciting Istanbul surgery adventures after a physician was a bit cavalier about my request for preventative care given details in my case file.

So why not get a little bit of time off with the loved ones and see some sights. A spot that particularly captured my imagination has two distinct demographics with widely divergent tastes.

A resort a thousand feet above the Ionian Sea

There are a number of beautifully styled women in their prime forties and fifties with gracefully maintained skin, silk caftans and sunhats. They seem to have children and husbands and are otherwise living their best life.

And then we have the younger crowd who I’ll call the cut-outs. In an ideal world, this would be Norma Kamali technical fabrics showing off her pioneering swimwear. That would be very sexy.

But it’s mostly different ways of showing off suggestive swathes of bare skin in clingy clothing. Lots of neon colors and odd cutout areas that get close to the action (side boob is popular) but still count as being covered. It is also mostly skintight but occasionally some volume is added to let some other salacious details pop.

These appear to be gaggles of girlfriends mostly. They don’t have men with them that I’ve seen, though I’ve seen a few couples where a young man has a woman dressed like this on his arm. And they are all made up in full beat makeup that would make a drag queen think “not very demure.”

When you make odd choices for travel and off the beaten path you sometimes see a hospitality culture that is both expensive enough to attract the tasteful but with enough flash that it plays on social media so the Instahoes aspire for picture. And believe me this spot is extremely Instagram friendly.

I am neither caftan Parker Posie mom nor young beautiful aspirational influencer (or OnlyFans star depending on who you ask) so I am staying out of the culture clash between richer hipster travelers and “it’s expensive so let’s show off” personas.

I am in a more wrap dress and kimono style woman when pools and beaches are involved. I am happy to enjoy the salt room and infrared sauna before a massage without styling my every single fit for the occasion. That said I did feel as if I nailed the vibe. All cotton and silk with one floral kimono for the pool. Even I need to live a little.

I got captured taking a selfie during golden hour before dinner
Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1682 and Hipster European Vacation Activated

If there is one complaint Americans have about Europe (and no this isn’t about air conditioning) it is their insistence on playing the worst kind of nightclub music absolutely everywhere.

You are getting your morning espresso and it’s trashy club music. You go eat at a normal neighborhood spot for a quiet dinner and you can feel the beat drop as they place your first course. Domenico Modugno isn’t on any Italian menus these days.

If you are by a hotel pool you better be ready to enjoy some Kylie Minogue nostalgia-core. Which I actually enjoy but I’ve been honest about maintaining my own nostalgia for Hotel Costes delivered by noise canceling headphones. It’s trashy but so is blasting up-temp remixes when I stare at the sea.

The more tourism because contentious in Europe, the worse the problem seems to get. It’s the belief of most proprietors that more local guests and tourists alike prefer this kind of cacophony. When you ask them about turning things down or towing on a playlist better suited to cuisine it can be hit or miss.

Especially if you are the sort to seek out the foodie destinations of a town. Nothing is quite the let down of eating a Michelin quality meal with a backing track of bad house music.

I am sure some tourists have furthered these stereotypes (I’m looking at you Britain). But assure you, Americans do not prefer this especially if your tourism is made up of the first wave of cultural hipster.

Once you go high margin (again apologies to the Europoor tourist) you do bave a very different customer base and they hate this shit We can tolerate your aversion to ice but not an aura assault.

If you have cultural touchstones in your own musical history, we’d much prefer that over dinner.

Authenticity is all anyone will have left in any smoothed over algorithmically perfected middle ground. And guess what it’s not Swedish House Mafia and no one wants Miami or Ibiza to be everywhere. Tallinn and Tirana have their own vibe.

Categories
Internet Culture Reading

Day 1676 and Having Public Fun in the Artificial Intelligence Era

It’s August and vacation season is in full swing. It seems as if all of Europe is off for the month. For the Americans who work around the school year, it’s their time for a week off as well.

We rarely vacation for an extended period and when we do it’s not generally during high season. Off season is where it’s at in my mind. But sometimes you need some fun when it’s been a hard time.

I’m struggling with how much I put online about my comings and goings and when I do it. Being careful used to mean not letting thieves know if you weren’t home but now the world is a mix of digital and physical security layered over artificial intelligence tools that can pinpoint you easily.

Opsec isn’t a thing elder millennials considered too carefully with digital identities in the early years of the internet but everything is changing. Dead internet theory may become true as the internet of bots begin.

I don’t intend to cede the digital commons though. I want my written voice to be integrated into the vast data troves that shift the records and is woven into the understanding of artificial intelligence and machine learning models.

The more these modalities of information storage and retrieval impact our human minds, the more necessary it is write oneself into “the Akashic records” that form our digitalization of information. Humans used to read and write machines but now machines and their media are just as likely to read and write our minds

So what are we to do about living in public? Humans are mortal but records of our world have a shot at reaching the future and shaping understanding.

Blogging has ended up being one of the best mediums for being scraped, organized and cited well by current artificial intelligence.

Open graph protocols, structured metadata structure, canonical URLS, tagging and linking, and authorial data and publication time are all part of a digital commons that have a distinct advantage over other closed garden content repositories for artificial intelligence. Being legible to the machines is now as important than being legible to each other.

So having your fun in public and making it accessible just might be one of the most important things you can do to be a part of the record of our world. It’s just a terrifying prospect to be so easily seen.