Tag: Social Media

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Internet Culture Media Startups

Day 1628 and Attention Whoring

Attention is a currency with an exchange rate so volatile even a hardened ForEx trader would find it exhausting.

There is a new set of younger founders who are taking the attention trade to new heights. Rate baiting marketing is to the 2020s what growth hacking was to the 2010s. Now a startup like Cluely could be the new the new Dollar Shave Club with its viral success. Or could go the way of Clinkle.

Because who cares how you widen the top of your funnel as long as you are getting enough such that down in the trenches of conversion you have enough leads.

Surviving as a startup isn’t easy and you should grab the opportunities you are given. Yet I imagine you end up with the Glen Gary Glen Ross “the leads are weak” kind of situation, but does management care? Probably not.

And so we continue to coarsen our shared business environment but who cares right? Always be closing.

A lot of people do care though. I care quite a bit. Because it is a trade you are making. Something may work but are you sure you can live with the trade? I am with my anon friend here.

attention whoring founders with mediocre goals actually do drive us deeper into cultural nihilism. technology is powerful, and the preservation of healthy culture among technologists is critical for civilization.

opportunity cost is real. the more skilled you are the more it matters. metrics do not matter. what happens to people, to the world, matters. everyone is responsible for upholding standards. every VC hungry for a multiple, every pair of captive eyes, everyone slightly more willing to run toward defecting plays while chasing fool’s gold- Bayeslord

I’ll never begrudge a market. I believe we should have more markets. Go ahead and make concrete your implicit assumptions about the world and humanity. Own it. Show the revealed preference.

But it’s worth knowing how we do that price discovery on these attention trades. In this world we have grounding validity for all kinds of disappointing facts. The world is made up of many noble lies. We all decide how we want to make our trade with reality.

And as to attention whores? Well, the oldest profession surely knows a lot about the soul of man. I’m sure we all share a desire for a greater spirit of man and aspire towards something greater. But sex sells.

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Chronic Disease Community

Day 1626 and Sleep It Off

I am coming off multiple days of in-person interactions. It has been nice to go from Costco to committees to backyard bbq.

I am tired. I intend to rest and alas because I am doing things in the moment I have had too few moments for even a brief rest. It has been a good time.

My HRV and my RHR are way down and way up respectively. I need that to reverse so I’ll sleep it off.

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Politics

Day 1620 and Yes Minister

I enjoy British comedy for all the usual reasons. Witty, acerbic, and dry cynicism make for a good laugh even if it seems like a challenging culture to actually live in.

Nerds of my elder millennial era were introduced to Monty Python by our parents but there are many others perhaps more worthy of constant quotation. It’s a diverse genre and helps manage stress about politics.

And sure every week has a “come see the violence inherent in the system” moment these days but it takes a really special kind of stupid to mount a four stages of a crisis narrative campaign in a matter of days. Political satire Yes Minister delivers an excellent example of this tactic.

To set the scene, Sir Humphrey Appleby the bureaucrat (excuse me, civil servant) and his elected minister who eventually fails up to Prime Minister Sir Richard Wharton. The episode is called “A Victory for Democracy” which as you can imagine it is not.

The stages of a crisis are as follows

  1. Stage One:
“Nothing is going to happen.”
    1. Stage Two:
“Something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.”
    2. Stage Three:
“Maybe we should do something about it, but there’s nothing we can do.”
    3. Stage Four:
      “Maybe there was something we could have done, but it’s too late now.”

It’s a very fast set of news cycles when you resign yourself immediately to stage four. Things pop off and escalate and soon we are faced with an ambivalent leadership response that shrugs blame as easily as it did responsibility.

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Internet Culture

Day 1618 and Girls Just Want to Tweet Fun

“Being extremely online is bad for you” has become a kind of common knowledge position the era of smart phone ubiquity. Every knows that everyone knows it’s bad for you.

It’s clear I do a lot of scrolling. I have an entire category here dedicated to internet culture. I am blessedly only addicted to Twitter. I refuse to download TikTok and I gave up Instagram years ago. I even tried to restart using Instagram and failed within the week.

Something about Instagram’s current culture makes me feel bad and as much as it has topics I personally (love like fashion) I can’t get past the icky feeling that it’s numbing my visual palette. It’s so bad I can’t even be a creator on it.

I like to have fun on the internet. I enjoy interactions, bon mots, hot takes, and niche interests. Instagram doesn’t feel like a great game of chance as Twitter can so why bother? Twitter is the best circus in town.

I know that when you star into the abyss it stars back at you. I am not immune to propaganda. Anyone with enough experience in the media business is acutely aware of how easy it is to influence the human mind.

But if I’m going to crack dick jokes in between scouting for venture deals and tracking financial and geopolitical news I am doing it on Twitter. Though if Bloomberg ever opened up its terminal to the unwashed we can circle our chub reveal futures contracts there instead. If you don’t know what that’s in reference to and have a delicate constitution don’t click ok?

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Politics

Day 1616 and All Hell Broke Loose

Well, I don’t even know how to begin explaining the public fight between Elon Musk and Donald Trump. I’ll say that it was the best afternoon on Twitter, maybe ever? But it was a sad day for America.

Group chats were popping off like it was holiday weekend and absolutely pandemonium reigned on every newsfeed. Major newspapers were maintaining timelines updated tweet by tweet. These are the WSJ and the New York Times late afternoon mountain time.

Today will take time to dissect and I’m sure the Wikipedia page for Thursday June 5th 2025 will be chaotic. So much ridiculous fighting and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. It was an ugly spat and a public display of contempt for the millions of Americans who just want our government to function.

But holy shit is it funny to see grown men lose their absolute minds publicly when the stakes are literally our government and the most important currency in the world. Honestly I’m so disappointed I can’t even take comfort in being at the very edge of the empire.

Categories
Aesthetics Reading

Day 1613 and Minority Opinion

Being disagreeable has a lot going for it. It’s frowned on when women do it even though it is usually coded as a feminine trait. Traditionalists say they want agreeable wives and iconoclast lords.

Despite this call to the past, it’s not hard to argue that this amenable feminine and chaotic masculine is itself a bit subversive. Fractious independent goddesses and agreeable brotherhoods are archetypes too.

I am fearful in this moment that we have less patience for disagreements among humanity just as our capacity for loyalty and reciprocity dims with atomization.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease has a bit of a “both sides of the bus” meme quality to it. Attention can build you up and tear you apart.

The eye of American’s elite class has many competing stories about which ideas must be celebrated, which are taboo and which are too dangerous to be discussed. And that’s just the last couple of days of essays at the New Yorker.

Categories
Aesthetics Politics

Day 1612 and Netrunner Molotov Bang Bang Summer

Being a mere node in a large but influential network I transmit as much as I receive. I intake and reroute information as part of my own synthesis process and I appreciate that it benefits me and others. But it also does damage and today was a rough start to June by any measure.

I saw a lot today and I only pass some of it along with the thought it’s going to be netrunner bang bang Gibsonian “who respects the nation state” asymmetrical energy Summer of 2025.

Any utopian dreams of a human noosphere of higher collective intelligence must reflect upon quotidian horrors showing our baser impulses daily and summer is war season for good logistical reasons.

Ukraine appears to have blow up a number of Russian fighter jets with drones smuggled in with trucks. Let’s recall the below image from last year. Ukrainian Netrunners vaping while flying FPV drones stepped up their game hardcore today.

Ukrainian FPV drone operator smoking a vape circa summer of 2024

believe this is the first ever direct attack on any nation’s nuclear triad in history, and it succeeded – @antroyn

Twitter is awash in footage of this drone attack on Russian fighter planes being drone bombed

Operation Spider Web showed the power of asymmetrical warfare and scared the shit out of deterrence war planners as drones versus air superiority is a worry that has now become persistent reality. Nuclear triad theory needs an update.

In other closer to home news, an older white gentleman firebombed a protest along Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall in what appears to be a kind of Molotov cocktail incident over Hamas hostages. It’s my hometown so this is upsetting beyond the wider context of terrorism over the situation. I fear for further tensions in liberal college towns.

Aesthetically, because it’s going to be a high volatility volume time on Wall Street, I am enjoying to see this Twitter account picking beautiful brutalism and “80s cocaine design aesthetics” out of the ether.

If one is to survive a summer of netrunners and volatility, this look will appeal to the sorts who want hyper focus, class & glass. While no one would recommend uppers, it’s clearly part of the overall vibe of managing nervous system input for anyone looking to do violence.

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Community Internet Culture

Day 1609 and We Train The Future

I’ve been writing about the increasing entropy in our systems for so long that the actual arrival of the chaotic years always felt like an inevitability that would never come. And yet they are here.

The internet is a hostile place as ideas war and humanity struggles with the weight of a fully networked world. I feel it in my body. I see the automation of attention grabbing even as the birth of the most powerful tools for control over my information environment have never been more readily available.

I persist in being a public human presence on the internet. I know I am part of the web. We built cyberspace out of a world of special interests and varied incentives and it’s giving us back something much larger than our individual contributions. I think the next stage of networking will offer us much more.

Because of that value of that potential I cannot let myself step back from shaping its form. The new world is trained on those of us who put up what we know, think, feel, and desire to be part of the human experience.

It’s not always a pretty picture but I will not cede this space simply because we have the tools to fill an infinity. I do not have an infinity. And I can hold out for a little bit in that time.

Categories
Finance

Day 1608 and TACO Trading

President Trump got pissed at CNBC Washington correspondent Megan Cassella for asking about a meme and now we have to worry about his reaction.

To quickly summarize, there has been a joke amongst the financial set about TACO trades.

The “TACO” trade, which is short for Trump Always Chickens Out. The tongue-in-cheek term, coined by a Financial Times columnist, has been adopted by some to describe the pattern in which markets tumble after Mr. Trump makes tariff threats, only to rebound just as sharply when he relents and gives countries more time to negotiate deals.

It’s been a reliable dynamic of the spring that high tariffs or “negotiating tactics” are introduced and the market drops and then we get a reprieve when the White House reacts and the cycle continues. Robert Armstrong noted the trade maybe a month ago but it’s been ongoing since Liberation Day in April. I don’t know why you’d ask Trump about this as of this as of course he’s going to react poorly but maybe some shorts decided to wag the dog.

“Don’t ever say what you said,” Trump told the reporter, calling it “the nastiest question.”

I have a bit of a monkeys paw relationship to this entire administration. I am in favor of significant reforms to the federal government and I am an avowed skeptic of central banking’s role in a complex and chaotic economy.

But I’m also a business woman. We can do all the TACO trades we like, but that’s not building anything and no one can do meaningful investing even medium term investment this climate.

As much as I appreciate criticisms of corporate power they are the only constituency who is fighting back on this. Like it or not, they represents the interests of shareholders and workers and this is wreaking havoc on everyone from Shopify storefronts to Procter & Gamble.

I’m not opposed to changing things and seeing what happens but the roller coaster makes it much less appealing to do business.

In other news, I am still waiting on an import nod a hyperbaric chamber so I’ve get some personal skin on this game.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 1607 and In-Groupie

I didn’t watch the latest season of the middle brow sci-fi for normies show Severance but I am going to be using the term “innie” as it’s caught cultural relevance enough to be helpful.

The idea of having inner and outer lives is a source of both misery and joy for sentient creature. I imagine it varies widely. So does our need for connection with others who can understand our inner selves.

I made a little “let’s be in-group” together tweet today as I myself like to feel a part of the network just as much as I enjoy inviting others into these networks. To be a part of a group and feel as if you are safely on the inside seems as close to a universal human experience as any.

There are corners of what are called “the cozy web” where it can feel safer to pick and choose who is in-group. I am of the mind that any platform, including more openly hostile ones, can offer the chance to form those bonds. I welcome you to be a part of mine.