I don’t recall exactly when I first began using WordPress. If memory serves, it was a friend James in the philosophy department at my university who set up and hosted my first blog sometime around 2003. Eventually I went out on my own.
While I’ve only been writing on JFredrickson.com for 1208 days (ha only) the current account I’ve been using since 2008 has an anniversary today.
Happy Anniversary with WordPress.com! You registered on WordPress.com 16 years ago. Thanks for flying with us. Keep up the good blogging.
I’m delighted to be a long time user of the service. I believe in the value of open source software and the stewardship of Matt Mullenweg. While there are plenty of other social media platforms where I can reach an audience no one has earned my trust like WordPress. II use many other content management systems, social media accounts and the like but for my own identity under my own control nothing else compares.
I have come to enjoy the logistics of self presentation. I used to resent the extent of the labor that could go into cosmetics & fashion when I worked in the industry. Now I can enjoy having put in the long hours to have acquired my skills.
I’ve put a lot of thought into how best to pack a bag. Handbags are a sort of Boy Scout style training for young women in that “be prepared” has come to mean having all the tools of the trade of femininity neatly stowed away in a stylish purse.
I’ve written extensively about my mixed feelings on packing & travel in the past, so it’s nice to have enjoyed that struggle and be able to now aside if I so desire. Packing a bag well has become a thing in which I am expert and that’s a lovely feeling.
The pleasure of negotiating the logistics of appearance can be a game to me now in a way that simply wasn’t when I was younger and struggling. Now when I don’t need to be perceived in a positive way to survive, I can enjoy the problem of optimizing for a giant game of “what am I saying without words” and more importantly “to whom?”
I’ve come to enjoy packing as the self soothing experience in a rapidly changing world. I can control some aspect of what I show to the world. It becomes a design problem. The three bag cascade is now a savvy way to manage airline chaos. The labels on my packing cubes become a pleasurable prayer ritual as I not so neatly write in cursive “black sleeve tee-shirt.”
I like the challenge of imagining the multiple social, professional, cultural and geographic flows I might navigate. Will I be able to manage the many different ways in which I might encounter other humans while they also live through the same set of fears & uncertainties of 2024? It can be terrifying (personal safety is a factor) and yet it’s absolutely a skills issue to navigate these things.
And so I ask “do technical fabric wrap dresses send the right message” or would I be better suited in cotton or silk if I’m in a desert? How about adding in semi-tropical humidity as a potential variable?
Every decision in how I pack a bag can represent a small marker in my perception by others as we manage this ridiculous system we inhabit together. It is a social game and everyone is playing. You might enjoy learning some of the rules too.
“If not in this lifetime then the next” is a pretty decent organizational principle for keeping folks from giving in entirely to the nihilism of their situation.
But what happens if no one thinks that there are any consequences? I am not actually sure what we do with a generation who never has to suffer the consequences of their actions.
This used to be a problem merely about in theory about the elderly and is now a very salient one for the young. There are fewer costs to acts of social disobedience.
Shame and guilt can be fully litigated through contracts and arbitration right? Right? I can’t say being neither Jewish nor Catholic but I’m not optimistic.
If you never suffer any consequences for bad decisions then do you keep making them forever? Did you know that Hall and Oates “Rich Girl” isn’t even about a girl? Do you care? Are you wondering who Hall and Oates even are?
You’re a rich girl, and you’ve gone too far ‘Cause you know it don’t matter anyway You can rely on the old man’s money You can rely on the old man’s money It’s a bitch girl but it’s gone too far
The song is actually about a spoiled fast-food chain heir who was an ex-boyfriend of Daryl Hall’s girlfriend, Sara Allen. Fun right?
I do not care for podcasts but I listen to a Bloomberg podcast called Odd Lots for entertainment. I’m an avid participant in the niche in-group you might have once called Financial Twitter. The hosts of the podcast Joe and Tracy are part of this community as well.
Usually I listen to it for the fun expert guests who come to do commentary on their corner of the markets. Today’s episode was titled how the American workforce got hooked on adderall. Which I personally think is a very provocative title.
Over the last few years, users of the popular ADHD drug Adderall have been frustrated by regular shortages in getting their prescriptions filled. Various regulatory and supply chain factors have contributed to the inability of producers to keep up with demand. But this raises the question: why is there so much demand in the first place? How did a significant chunk of the labor force — from tech workers to Wall Streeters — begin using the drug as an aid for their work and everyday lives? On this episode of the podcast, we speak with Danielle Carr, an assistant professor at the Institute for Society and Genetics at UCLA, who studies the history of politics of neuroscience and psychology. We discuss the history of this medicine and related medicines, what it does for the people who take it, and how market forces opened the drug up to almost anyone.
My impression of Danielle Carr was of a nuanced thinker with a lot of historical insight who happened to have haplessly taken on some academic moralizing about whether the wrong class of person might be abusing stimulants. I’m perhaps the wrong class of person to be commenting as I don’t use any stimulants stronger than a cup of coffee in the morning.
I was struck how the narrative eventually came to demonizing market demands in contrast to the I’m sure completely neutral national health systems. The theory being we might keep better track of the vulnerable in such a system struck me as classist. Adderall may be an American healthcare market issue only because those poor London bankers have another go to black market stimulant. We just don’t mind because they make money.
Moral panics around pharmacological intervention seem to be a flavor of the decade sort of thing. Prohibitions catch on when the wrong kind of person gets themselves into trouble of abusing something that was otherwise contained to social sanctioned consumption.
Perhaps in less inclined to judge on these things because I don’t witness the abuse but I also think paternalism is the excuse schoolmarms and aristocrats love in equal measure.
Even after twelve hundred days of writing every single day I still get great pleasure from seeing a nice round number when it comes around. I don’t have anything grand to say this far into the experiment except that it’s good to have consistent habits.
There is a category of the extremely online that subscribes to “nothing ever happens” but you find if you journal long enough that quite a bit happens all the time. It’s not so much that “it’s happening” but rather that life continues to find a way.
Things fall apart but so do they come together. The round numbers of consistency are m simply reminder to myself that taking action is what makes your life come together.
I wasn’t in the path of totality for today’s eclipse. Practical matters leave me less able to pick up for shared cultural experiences these days.
Nevertheless I followed along thanks to the livestreams from NASA conveniently running on multiple social media platforms. It’s definitely not the same thing as experiencing an eclipse (I was lucky enough to see the 2017 eclipse) but it was still incredibly moving.
A screenshot from the NASA livestream from Mazatlan Mexico
I had on public radio as well. I had run out to get food and ate my lunch as totality swept across North America. The NPR host went from county to county. You could hear cheering. One reporter who picked up for her station yelled “we are on the radio” as the entire station was clapping and laughing.
I am not feeling well today and used all the capacity I had to simply push at the edges of my universe and scream a bit into the abyss.
Screaming into the abyss is my pet name for being on the internet. Mostly Twitter. I know it sounds stupid.
Sometimes there are actual people on there still which is a small comfort. Just telegraphing into the universe that you are a “live one” is half the battle of bringing the future into the present.
I know it sounds like a stupid way to bring in resources and deals and alliances but it works. Make of that what you will. I’ll get on a phone call now and again if you are really compelling and intelligent. I spent some time on the phone with one of my favorite people and it was more energy than I would have anticipated.
Sometimes that’s just how it goes. There is only so much you can do when your time horizons for results are measured in a ten year cycle anyway.
It’s occasionally embarrassing to admit there are days I don’t have the energy to manage what what I eat, how much I exercise, whether I bath or do farm chores or otherwise manage the work of physical reality.
A few days of the month I do the absolute minimum to manage stasis and I honestly even that was a stretch. But like the classic Monty Python sketch of another era “I’m not dead yet!”
I first sensed it when I picked up a copy of the Financial Times going through Heathrow in February. I was behind the news cycle. I read through the pink paper and felt informed.
Normally I wouldn’t be satisfied with just one news source. No matter how much I overweight my personal preferences to business papers I wouldn’t limit myself to just those publications.
But then I realized I had neither the time nor the patience to get up on the nuances of the day. I love the news business and even I felt weary about wading through the firehouse.
If a new hound like me who loves reading reactionaries of all stripes couldn’t do more than scan some financial numbers how did everyone else feel? Not good, not good at all.
The Normie Restoration
We are reaching a fascinating moment in history in which you can be shockingly well informed about almost anything in real time.
Naturally this means we “know” less than we ever did. I can read propaganda from every viewpoint straight from the source straight on Telegram chats. The most informed know they getting just a fraction of the story.
During the Great Dislocation (roughly 2019-2023 though many of us went into much earlier), there was a new openness to seeing beyond institutional consensus. We saw a flourishing of open condemnation of all forms of institutional knowledge and media was at the epicenter of much of that rage.
Many groups did not do well with the newfound power they had found in the hands of shifting alliances and new attention.
My theory is that the lunatic fringes of both the left & right have handled their digital powers poorly. As they did not handle the attention with care we will see a return to mass media preferences as people return to “non-normalcy.” Our trust has been spread too thin and too far and everyone has to tend to their own.
Who, or even what, ends up being the mass media substitute going forward ks not yet settled as the waning days of cable television & national papers will not disappear until the Boomers move on.
We are starting to realize little value is accrued by sourcing news from many sources as more competing narratives spin out to Cray Cray Land. Everyone has become audience captured. And not all audiences are equal. Not all voices are equal either.
People may think I’m insinuating that it’s about control or truth or ideological niche. I want to disabuse you of this notion. Media is about attention. People with different goals want your attention focused on what they think is important.
Anyone with responsibility has an attention limit. People with responsibilities are the people with power. They can’t manage with endless attention conflicts. They can and do resolve these conflicts on their attention all the time.
And many of them are about to resolve that by not paying attention. So you have to ask yourself if you think they are wrong. The new non-normal isn’t very forgiving of distraction.
I spent the day on binging a monomyth in service of focusing some attention on where we might be going if this is in fact a Cambrian explosion era. If you need a synopsis I’ll extract it from Twitter if I can find the toolsets. If you know the toolset please share them.
The fellowship of the ring will not doom the hobbits to torment and death
My assumption that property rights underlined some of this still stands. If you’ve been holed up in Middle Earth (me too nice place unclear though unclear if I’m a Hobbit or an elf or a dwarf or a wizard or an orc Or Tom Bombadil) everyone thinks Mordor somehow their pet theory or sin. It is industrialism or fascism or some combination of horrors because history becomes legend and legend becomes myth. I don’t know. Ask an autist.
Hug a hippie. Be kind to a hipster. But fight to the death for the hackers. Or pick a princess who likes trade disputes in the galactic empire. I can’t translate all the monomyths in one day.
If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of one of my information dumps, you know me to be a science fiction reader. It’s one of my true passions and most consistent hobbies.
I am very well read in the space through this love and it has proven to be an enormous advantage for a career in technology startups. It’s very rare to meet a builder that hasn’t in some way come to that love through imagining the future as it could be.
While I love classics from Asimov to Heinlein and I read everything from space opera to hard tech, my first true passion for genre fiction was cyperpunk. I saw a networked world of computation and I fell in love.
So it is with great sadness that I learned of the passing of one of the giants of science fiction, cyberspace progenitor, father of the tech singularity and mathematician Vernor Vinge.
His 1981 novella “True Names” was perhaps the first story to present a plausible concept of cyberspace, which would later be central to cyberpunk stories by William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and others. Many innovators of modern industry cite “True Names” as their keystone technological inspiration.
It’s through the vision of authors like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson that I saw what computing could do to help us build.
Cyperpunk wrote many imaginative paths for artificial intelligence. Gibson’s Neuromancer and gave us early crypto culture. Neal Stephenson showed us a virtual world atop our current one in Snowcrash. The metaverse emerges.
I’ve lived my entire adult life online after an entirely analog childhood. I am straddling that small gap of in-between human. I helped build some small parts of the network of the internet. I am a citizen of the network state. I am all these things because of Vernor Vinge.
Humanity shines with tools and we had found in math a way to give an explanation of the workings the world. That our meager intelligences learned to compute and then to build computing machines astounds me.That we continue to build something more with those insights astounds me further. The acceleration of that started long before me.
Networking our computation has taken us so far and so fast. It reflects the best and worst of us. Vernor explored “what if“ futures that went far behind our contained cyberspace. We wouldn’t have modern singularity thought about what could happen if artificial intelligence really will emerge amongst us without Vinge’s work. The Zones of Thought series is a mind bender.
Vernor is as close as nerds have to a prophet. Here we are seeing the power of artificial intelligence dominate our human great power debates from culture to business to government. Everyone who makes things has an opportunity here to own building this.
I know that in whatever moment we are about greet (singularity or not) that I remember that we humans build technology from the imagination of Vernor Vinge.
No matter how alien the future may seem, we humans have build it first. Don’t you want to be a part of that?
