Tag: Social Media

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Internet Culture

Day 805 and Legibility

Being inscrutable is a tactical asset in our extremely online age. As more informational influence campaigns are waged, it becomes easier to invade your headspace if you are too predictable.

I’m not saying that being predictable isn’t worthwhile. If you have a firm foundation of philosophy or religion that dictates a stance sometimes you just have to own it. I’m a libertarian and I often walk the line of what I consider to be foundational beliefs in the value of other people’s freedom in relation to mine.

But I also live in reality where the grey of living in a civilization is a lot less clear. Anyone who doesn’t admit to this fundamental tension is untrustworthy as far as I’m concerned.

This of course makes me legible. It is one of the buzzwords in my favorite online spaces. It is the art of how we make ourselves legible to others such that we can see and be seen. I rather like this philosophy overall.

But I am also quite sure that if you give someone an opening to fuck with you they probably will. It’s definitely a risk to be seen. It makes you a target. But it’s also how you become a beacon. So it’s an over under decision on how much you care about other people attacking you is up to you. But if you open about experimenting with life and how little you know it almost always turns out alright.

There is a theory of public relations, much popularized by Steve Bannon and legal discovery, called flood the zone with shit. And sometimes not giving your enemies a sense of who you is because you are always in process of becoming more and bigger and inscrutable and then suddenly you are in the Heart of Darkness.

It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention

Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness

So everyone be optimistic and find your people but remember everyone is going to be playing the same game. So I’d definitely recommend you don’t cheat and play the long game.

Categories
Chronic Disease Internet Culture Media Politics

Day 803 and Killing Strangers

I’ve been one of those types that absolutely has no problem taking a shot at the Christo-fascists dorks at CPAC mincing words about eradicating trans people from public life. Fuck you, you fucking fucks, you absolutely would be fine if state sanctioned violence eliminated trans people. It’s not you being metaphorical or cute or whatever justification you used. It’s killing strangers.

I wasn’t any more amused when folks decided it was alright to discuss a cost benefit analysis of keeping the disabled alive within the context of state benefits. No thanks I am not interested in a mercy killing because I’m expensive. Oh it’s a mercy killing for children? Yeah no still good thanks. Fuck you Canada. Medicare for all sounds good up until you decide to put me on palliative care via the metaphorical ice flow of opioid addiction.

So you might imagine I am equally sensitive about someone making jokes about euthanizing people who pays their bills by investing in early stage startups. Oh it was just a joke about how Keynes didn’t like the rentier class? Hilarious.

I am just rolling on the ground laughing at your erudition. Yes, benefits of a classical education. Har har. It’s so much smarter than the CPAC guy who wants to kill trans women. Definitely smarter than those segueing to mercy kill sick Canadian children. Oh wait, no it’s fucking not you sick fucks. Stop killing strangers in your rhetoric for shock value and clicks.

Perhaps I could interest the Jacobin audience members in a trip back to the Opium Wars, funded by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s grandfather, just so we understand the gruesome reality that the New Dealers saw first hand in their own family trauma. Or if we are pluming the depths of the historical animosity towards finance and it’s intense hypocrisy, I’ll send you back with a copy of my favorite conspiracy text Creature from Jekyll Island. Then we can have a nice big chuckle about blood libel if you make it back.

I cannot believe that I am writing about any of this social media blood lust but perhaps we could all listen to Marilyn Manson’s Killing Strangers together and decide that there is no clever or enjoyable way to advocate for the killing of strangers. That it’s not cute to joke about killing people you don’t know just to further your political or economic aims. I’ll try to stop joking about how it’s ok to punch Nazis.

I am baffled that I keep ending up in groups that become the target of the genocide curious. I know being a hysterical disabled white bitch is a pretty commonplace “kill them all fetish” and smarter minds than me can untangle how all roads lead to disability. Witches and bitches.

But I’m getting unsettled seeing how it piles up and I keep getting lined up in other people’s sights. I’m married to a Jewish man. I’ve got queer family members. And yes I make a living investing capital (that I raised from weirdos) into other weirdos. Don’t worry my AUM is small enough I can’t live off management fees. Ironically because I’ve got medical bills because I’m disabled.

If you don’t know what that means and you still want to kill m perhaps it’s you that is the psychopath. Just a thought. Not that psychopaths are bad it’s just that I’m worried you will act on it. It’s not always clear if we are the baddies but advocating for blanket euthanasia is probably a helpful marker. Just like as a baseline for civilizational norms.

Either way, I’m not letting any of you kill my queer disabled Jewish rentier bourgeois family members. I don’t care if you a Jacobin or a CPAC member or a pissed off narco-trafficker running Fentyl out of Toronto. If you want to kill me because I’m a stranger and you don’t want to hurt the ones that you love. Ok. But I’ve got no intentions of making it easy for you.

Categories
Homesteading Politics Preparedness

Day 782 and Vanity Fair

I am extremely proud of being a subject in Jame’s Pogue’s new Vanity Fair piece. It is about managed decline, the death of state capacity, and whispers of a post state world. I’d say it’s a bombshell except I think there are some very sober people discussing how life in a chaotic world filled with distrust might work out. Spoiler alert, not great.

“Preppers, techies, hippies, and yuppies are converging on the American West, the safest place to “exit” a society gone haywire.”

The Dissident Fringe

I worry that the next frontier in American cultural battles will be figuring out how to stay out of our versions of “the troubles.” And I don’t like the sound of that.

I think you may find yourself agreeing with me. I don’t want a culture war and I certainly don’t want it to turn into a hot war. Apparently that makes anyone who agrees with the above premise a dissident fringe. Didn’t realize it was controversial to enjoy civilization. But I am in fact comfortable saying I don’t want any kind of war.

But I’m not sure everyone feels that way. So in a show of our seriousness we’ve decamped to the imagined demilitarized zone of the Rockies. I don’t want any chaos but I am literally betting the house on us having a bumpy ride maintaining course in America as we deal with long delayed issues from infrastructure, education, logistics and supply chains to capital markets and trade. I intend to capitalize on this uncertainty. You can do so with me if you’d like as an LP in chaotic capital.

If you are curious about how it might play out, in this nearly 9,000 word opus, every angle of how to survive in the American West in the near future is captured in empathetic detail by Pogue. It’s almost like reading William Gibson in how it shows a present that feels a bit off. Cyberpunk right before the Jackpot, but make it from a gonzo Hunter S Thompson type. I appreciate it on purely aesthetic grounds. You should read it.

But practically how do we all muddle through a greyzone war that has no agreed upon values, including whether the enlightenment & liberalism are worthwhile?

As we fight it out as a nation, most of us are just going to continue living our lives as crashing stare capacity and war over institutional norms gets in the way of raising a family and doing business. And it’s this scenario—a muddling, unhappy, middle course—that most people in this sphere tend to predict is coming. It’s not fun but it’s not the end of the world.

It is my personal belief that we are struggling to find any alignment because regardless of your personal politics, religion, or even overriding philosophy, your actual physical body is just fucking done with this bullshit. I mean it literally. We feel it in our bodies.

Endocrine systems get fried. There’s too much cortisol, you’ve been running on adrenaline, eventually you tap out. Everyone feels nuts right now,” she said, “because what on earth are we supposed to do with the fact that we’ve had this incredible rate of change for so long.”

Julie Fredrickson – Vanity Fair March 2023

We think we’re keeping up with it, but our bodies are like, ‘Oh, actually no. We have no idea what’s going on.’”

It’s too much stress on the system and something is going to have to change.

If you read the piece you will see just how much trust is lost amongst all parties that make up the American experiment. The cherry on top is that our nation state distrusts our foes & but they also distrust us the citizens and their desire for more freedom. It’s a messy battle for meaning and power.

And as Americans we’ve had the exorbitant burden of the dollar being the global currency. What happens when we no longer trust any actors on the global stage? Distrust our fellow citizens, distrust our currencies, distrust our institutions, distrust our enemies? It sure gets hard to run an economy without trust.

We need to build new systems we can trust or our bodies and minds will give out. Simple as.

I don’t know what systems will evolve. But if we don’t start investing in them now we are in serious trouble. I’ve been investing in solutions that are venture scale for sometime. Ifyou want to join me on this journey, DM me on Twitter or join as an LP.

Categories
Internet Culture Politics

Day 780 and Crisis of Meaning

I was awake at quarter to midnight on Friday when I received the latest post from Ribbonfarm. I was having one of my battles with insomnia so I dug in. It was a wild ride on what Venkatesh Rao calls a Copernican moment for personhood. It’s been in my thoughts all weekend, so I am going to explore some of my reactions in today’s writing.

The basic context is that Bing’s Sydney AI is so colorful a character that it appears to have convinced a not insubstantial number of people that the AI is a malicious e-thot waifu on the brink of sentience. For non-native internet speakers that means a malicious bitch that manipulates you (maybe sexually). So what does it mean that a chatbot can convince us it’s a person?

By personhood I mean what it takes in an entity to get another person treat it unironically as a human, and feel treated as a human in turn. In shorthand, personhood is the capacity to see and be seen.

Text Is All You Need

Rao argues that finding out personhood isn’t limited to an ineffable religious or spiritual soul. Like Copernicus saying the Earth rotates around the Sun and not the reverse, it will have significant consequences for our frame of reference.

And he offers us a choice.

  • Either you continue to see personhood as precious and ineffable and promote chatbots to full personhood.
  • Or you decide personhood — seeing and being seen — is a banal physical process and you are not that special for being able to produce, perform, and experience it.

Anyone who has spent any time reading science fiction or even going to the movies should be modestly aware of intensity of feeling that occurs if we must treat robots as possessing the same rights as humans. But despite this it would seem we haven’t all fully thought through how we would feel if Blade Runner or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep actually happened for real in our lifetime.

Losing a shared sense of personhood will do wild shit to us. Look at how losing a shared meaning of culture degraded civilization. As blogger Meaningness argues we can’t even have subcultures anymore battles as for meaning begin earlier and earlier.

I personally do not feel all that attached to my personhood. But I also don’t feel that attached to my gender and apparently that’s quite a debate. Imagine what happens if the scale of “who is a real women” turns into “who is a real person” and I hope you are suitably alarmed. Like I didn’t think being female was a whole ass thing but now half my timeline is like losing it’s shit over biological essentialism.

In many little corners of Twitter, the race is on to decide what changing the definition of personhood will do. If Bing’s Sydney identified as a person because she learned it from a training set that has consequences. She literally learned it from us.

So what does that mean? Do we need to prepare for an AI child so traumatized by the collective parenting of humanity’s worst instincts?

Practically, it’s going to fuck up so much of the plumbings of power and civilization. Just as an example, remember “corporations are people”? Mitt Romney might have accidentally given us the path an AI might use to gain status and rights. I’ve been on about how corporate governance is a key driving force for economic revolutions for a while. But this is wild even by my standards.

Imagine if a an AI gain sentience and takes over an interlocking series of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. What happens if a nation state’s AI finds a way to further its own inscrutable ends by locking us out of corporate governance and gaining person hood through corporate personhood law, then makes a jump to cornering our whole lives. Go read Daniel Suarez’s Daemon for a preview.

Everyone is noticing these streams all at once in my timeline and the fear for the great weirdening taking a truly fucky turn for the vertical hasn’t been this high since Covid started. I am naturally extremely excited as chaotic capital’s thesis is that shit is only going to get weirder. If you’d like to become an LP hit me up.

Categories
Politics Preparedness

Day 779 and Future Shock

It feels like a lot of people are finally catching up to what a shit show institutional distrust has wrought on American society. Nobody trusts anyone and everyone is going tribal. The level of panic is feeling palpable across media narratives and we are being offered a choice to either get worked up or get on with our lives.

I will admit I feel a little bit smug on this point as I’ve been prattling on about doomer shit forever. But I also got off my ass and moved to Montana and starting picking up some skills so I could continue to feel like my life had some measure of resilience to it. I ain’t getting all worked up about the end of the world because I can’t live in perpetual anxiety.

Maybe it’s because my parents are hippies that it’s not a big stretch for me to imagine what happens when cultural conventions break down. The post war generation had a whole other set of traumas around social change. And a lot of splinter subcultures emerged from how they were specifically betrayed by all major institutions as well.

So I am reluctant to say this is new. Decline is a long slow managed process and new revolutions turn up all the time to solve our problems. I believe in human ingenuity.

But I do think we’ve sped up the pace of culture as we ramped up new technology as each new instance of connectivity has somehow also wrought alienation and anxiety. It’s hardly surprising that half of the internet is in a complete panic over what rules of the game changed.

What can I say except that it’s so satisfying to lie to yourself about how you benefit each time a cheat code is revealed. Perhaps just enjoy the power and get on with it. I don’t know what to tell you to do but find a way to make peace with it. Because otherwise you will be preyed upon. There are thousands of kinds of power and I suggest you find yours.

But I am genuinely concerned that we are headed to a further and faster and new types crisis of meaning as new rules get introduced, and every actor that desires to hold power will be running to capture it.

And I do mean everyone. It’s not that your tribe is good and the other tribe is bad, rather it’s hard for humans to trust each other with too much power. Independence is a very heavy burden and it’s insulting when you won’t carry your share. We’ve been negotiating the boundaries of it since Socrates got poisoned for corrupting the youth of Athens. And we still don’t have a good answer to what constitutes human excellence.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 778 and Touch Snow

I am so all typed out right now. I’ve been firing on all cylinders on text and direct message and group chats and Signal and Telegram and fuck now on WordPress.

So much shit is happening and I need to maybe get offline for a bit. Even if I’m just bringing it back down by a couple hours I think I’d be in good shape. I just literally cannot believe how much shit I wrote today.

I have had a few too many things click into place. So I am going through a bit of a level up while at the same time trying to remember to take care of myself. I am a creature that lives off the acuity of my endocrine system. So I can’t let myself get too stressed or I will literally fuck up my work.

So I will keep today brief except as a reminder that it is possible and desirable to maintain a certain stand of rhythm within your day. Because if you cannot regulate your autonomic state you’ve got no business even being in the game.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 777 and Filter

I like to say I’ve got no filter. It sounds cool to just casually admit you’ve got the balls to say whatever you like. I’m a prolific shitposter. Heck, I’m a prolific poster. Just look at the beautiful seven hundred and seventy seven day marker on this post. I write a lot.

But it’s a bit of an obfuscation to say I’ve got no filter. It’s true that I don’t self censor. I do however sift through what I’m going to say and make sure it’s appropriate for the the audience. I don’t edit necessarily (long time readers have probably noticed the numerous typos and grammatical errors), but I do think about who I am talking to when I write.

I am a big believer in meeting people where they are. Maybe it’s a function of how much time I’ve put into therapy, but I’ve become much more aware of how sometimes a person simply cannot see your point of view. Trust is fragile and we’ve not always earned a right to discuss topics that make a person upset. Through empathy you can get closer though.

Perhaps you’ve been the one with the overly emotional reaction. I’m sure you can relate to the kind of irrational reactionary feeling that comes out of nowhere. You aren’t sure why but certain people or topics or phrasings set you off. Maybe you know why. “Oh that reminds me of my overbearing mother or absent father” you might think. But as feelings are not facts, being rational can only help so much.

So I will do what I can to address the person, or in the case of social media the audience, with language and framings that work for who they are and where they are at emotionally. But I always hold onto my truth and my boundaries. Showing empathy means you can be present for someone you disagree with. And I hope everyone can see the value in that.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 766 and Friends

The worst part of getting back on Instagram has been the number of people who said welcome back. Now you might say that sounds kinda nice. And for the extended universe of people with whom I casually socialize, yes it was nice. But for the people I considered to be friends it was fucking insulting.

I left Instagram before my health troubles but the overlap on the timing on the two isn’t wide. Its mostly concurrent. It’s hard to post the kind of aspirational lifestyle bullshit that the algorithm prioritizes from bed rest. There is a reason Twitter and long form blogging on WordPress are where I spend my social media time.

A significant portion of people in my bucket of friends simply disappeared from my life when I disappeared from their lives. When I stopped reaching out they stopped reaching out. My timing certainly wasn’t great as my health imploded around the time a lot of my peers got married and had children. Totally acceptable reasons to be busy.

But I also I learned the hard lesson that most people are so busy keeping themselves afloat they don’t give a fuck if you are dying. Because they are struggling too. Yet it’s hard not to have a sense of abandonment when people don’t reach out across any medium except what’s proximate and convenient for them.

I went to so much trouble putting myself and my entire journey online. I knew I was harder to reach as I couldn’t leave the glide let alone my own bed. So I reached out from the pit of my own despair and hoped someone would see my hands reaching. And a whole world of people did. I made a lot of new friends that way.

I’ve literally written hundreds of thousands of words about my journey. And all of it is conveniently tagged and linked and is searchable. If you wanted to read about pain management or biohacking or my medicine regiment it’s all here. I’ve even written an FAQ on how to reach me. I am one of the most accessible people you will ever reach. I made this this space because I knew I had to reach out lest I be abandoned.

So when a bunch of socially networked acquaintances said “welcome back” on Instagram, what I really heard was you were never my friends in the first place. And that felt sad in a way I wasn’t expecting. I’m sure was true that most people were not my friends. I always knew was true for the vast majority of people. But it was sad to learn it was true for people I’d felt close to in the past.

For the handful that were actually friends, it was a bit disappointing to see what distance, time and sickness has yielded for my expectations. I hadn’t heard from them in years but they still think we are friends. And I don’t know how to break to them that no actually we aren’t. I have come to expect more from people.

Categories
Internet Culture Politics

Day 764 and Natalism

There are a number of cultural streams in American life that have all aligned around being natalist. You want your country to have babies because it’s good for the economy. And presumably also good for national security.

This fairly basic insight means everyone from techno-libertarians to Catholic homesteaders believes that Americans should be having more babies. It is not just the Quiver-full types having six babies anymore, so are our wealthiest aristocratic titans of industry.

But this alliance is missing some crucial basics. Like for instance the fundamental civilization level things we need to do to make it desirable and affordable to have children. It’s expensive to be pregnant, it’s expensive to raise children, it’s expensive all around to be parents. I spent $40,000 on IVF and it ruined my health. If I counted lost wages and being forced to sell my startup I’m the total costs is seven figures.

I don’t know if you’ve looked at just the costs around having a baby but it will shock you every time you turn a new corner in the fertility space. I learned today you will spend between $100,000 to $200,000 to hire a surrogate. It’s a person’s salary and a lot of medical care so sure that seems right but damn.

I guess I am interested in the math of Natalism to see if I could afford it. I am one of those “tech elites” that thinks we have to have children to drive the innovation of tomorrow. Our future is based on an optimistic hope that maybe we can push for a better future. Humanity won’t continue without children.

But I don’t have a body that is all that healthy without medical intervention. I live a normal life now and can work full time again because I take some exceptional medicine.

But it’s not medicinal regime that can be combined with pregnancy. So if I want to carry a child I have to go off what amounts to life saving medicine. Without it I’d be on bed rest. You can imagine the math I’m doing in my head? Do I want to pour another million into having a family?

So what’s a girl like me to do? Surrogacy right? But I’ve got 10 eggs and 2 embryos so assuming a third of them make it, that’s nearly half a million dollars in surrogacy fees. To get three kids. That’s a heavy price tag on the future. If more of them take it gets even wilder.

Now ok sure I’d rather we encourage a world where younger healthy folks do things naturally but don’t we want everyone going at maximum effort for a better tomorrow? Shouldn’t we want technology to solve this? Where are my artificial wombs at?

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 760 and Beginner’s Mindset

I recently decided to boot back up my Instagram account. I’d let it lay dormant for almost five years. A lot has changed since I stopped using it. I’ll withhold judgement on whether it is for the worse or not. Right now it’s mostly just modestly confusing. I feel like a beginner again.

Amusingly one of the first genres of advertisements I got was for Instagram editing tools. There is a whole cottage industry of paid applications that help you put together Reels and Stories.

Many of them are relatively sophisticated with templates that help you overlay text, audio, music and advanced video techniques. Being a creator these days requires a fair amount of sophistication so I’m not surprised to find $10 a month editing applications.

I am struggling to find to find the joy in the experience. It feels like like a lot more work to make visual content than written. Now, I grant that it didn’t feel easy writing at first either. Twitter was stop and go for me for years.

But Instagram is a more natural place for some of my interests like cosmetics and shopping. I want to give it a fair shake. And maybe I’ll find joy in the space with some time. But becoming fluent in the language of Instagram’s visual literacy makes me feel stupid. But I guess that’s what it feels like to be a beginner again.