Tag: Social Media

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 660 and When Extremely Online Goes Terminal

I committed one of the cardinal sins of the extremely online yesterday. So much discourse was happening I overwhelmed myself. Just like an endless stream of stuff was hitting my hind brain and like an idiot I just kept drinking from the firehose of engagement. I stayed up till 1am.

I’m typically careful about how much central nervous system stress I’m willing to tolerate. It’s a hazard of the job when being visibly online and searching for investments is mostly virtual. Purposely consuming a significant amount of bad news or scrolling the deep cuts of the dark corners of the message boards is meant to be done in small doses. I have no need to push my endocrine system into permanent fight or flight. No one does. It’s very counterproductive.

Going into a sympathetic nervous response is a part of life though. Some stress is good. I have an entire routine for soothing an overstimulated vagus nerve. I take adaptogens. I meditate. I live in Montana with plenty of open spaces and fresh air. I am skilled in discerning agitprop from all corners of the information wars. When I dive into the dopamine river I do so responsibly with the right tools. Don’t try this at home kids.

But that doesn’t mean I’m immune from drowning in the dopamine drip. I just have a good chance of pulling myself out before it’s too late. Around 9pm or so it became clear that even after a quiet dinner, some CBD and THC gummies, and relaxing television with my husband that I was in fact still very much in sympathetic response.

I panicked a little bit as hour after hour passed and I continued to be reactive. I’d started a negative flywheel. I took an Ativan fully expecting the steroid of the mind to knock me out. It did not. And so giving in to all my worst impulses stayed on Twitter. Fuck it if the good rare drugs weren’t doing it. I said “let ‘er rip!” I had recently finished the Bear.

Today I undid the damage. I slept until my body decided it was time to wake up. I followed my supplement routine carefully. For the TMI readers I had about a dozen orgasms. I slept some more. I stretched and took a walk. I took a long leisurely shower with every possibly form of exfoliating and conditioning I could imagine. And now at the end of the day I think I might have pushed my case of terminally online back to a place of merely extremely online. Let that be a lesson to everyone.

Categories
Emotional Work Startups

Day 655 and Accountability

Being accountable to myself is much harder than being accountable to someone else. I suspect this is true for most people. We all wish for ideal childhoods with parents who provided for all our emotional needs. And so we look to bosses, spouses and authority figures as substitute parents.

Most of our adult lives are spent trying to find some ideal mommy or daddy to soften the trauma and lack of our childhoods. We remember these issues far too vividly as adults through the perceptions of our inner child. It is a huge challenge to recognize that feelings are not facts but these feelings nevertheless run our lives.

The unfortunate truth is that the only ideal parent that can ever exist for our inner child is ourselves. We must comfort, protect and nurture that part of ourselves that still feels lacking because no one else can give it to us. No one is coming to save us. We are the parent to our inner child.

Which brings me back to my challenge with being accountable to myself. I struggle to care for myself the way I need as I too often perceive myself as not being good enough. If I just worked harder or spent more time preparing or if I just did one more pass on my pitch deck. You get the idea. I’ll push myself right over the edge of success into inaction and self torture.

One way I’ve been able to overcome this need to push myself into a fantasy of accountability is simply by building in public. If I’ve said what I plan to do then I’m no longer just cultivating it inside myself but I’ve let the idea come forth into reality. Once it is outside of my own tortured bubble of personal accountability it can gain momentum.

I am raising money for a venture fund and now that I’ve put that in public it’s not just about me. It’s about the thesis, the LPs, the founders, and the market. And it’s much easier to be accountable to a shared reality with other people than some fantasy version of perfection inside my head. If you’d like to be a part of it and are an accredited investor here is a link to my calendar. If you’d like to read more about the fund I’d be thrilled.

Categories
Finance Internet Culture

Day 654 and Inappropriate Language

As much as I love to joke about getting cancelled on Twitter, I’ve never actually worried about getting dinged. I resisted getting a Blue Check and otherwise pursuing the trappings of being a power user as I was confident that my real world connections would overcome any algorithmic nonsense.

Digital power still resides on a firmament of real world power. I figured I know the right people in real life at Twitter, so short of me encouraging a coup while also being the President of the United States of America, I was pretty safe in maintaining control of my account. This was perhaps a bit naive and I knew it.

The algorithms do in fact come for us all. I got an unprompted warning today that a user on my account (I’m the only user but whatever) had been deemed to be using inappropriate language.

A Twitter warning saying my account AlmostMedia has inappropriate language so is ineligible to run advertisements

At some point I had the power to run promoted posts, otherwise known as advertisements, but because I have angered the language police at Twitter I am now no longer allowed to pay to promote my own speech. I guess I overrode the “are you sure you want to tweet this most users don’t use this speech” warning one too many times.

I swear more than average for a woman but probably a lot less than average for someone in finance. My account is notably a shitposter account. I remain fascinated by social status and access of all kinds, and shitposting remains of the higher status activities in social media culture as it demonstrates you need not be censored by social mores or common decency. Except apparently I can be.

You can get worked up about whether this infringes on my speech as I can say anything I like but now I’m no longer able to pursue any paid reach. This is the popular theory that everyone is entitled to free speech but not free reach. Or I guess in my case paid reach.

To be honest I had no intention of buying any paid reach advertising on Twitter. The folks I care about generally seem to get my Tweets and I’ve got no sense I’ve been shadow banned. Well, ok now I am worried but I wasn’t before this goofy warning.

To me this feels like a reminder that Twitter just doesn’t give a fuck about its power users. I am a well networked and well liked (or well hated) account with powerful followers in the core demographics that matter on Twitter.

I sit inside a nexus of media, finance and Silicon Valley personalities that care a lot about the platform even as the platform mostly doesn’t give a shit about us. Which is arguably why we’ve all spent six months giving a shit about Elon Musk buying Twitter. When a power user gets banned from advertising producers it’s not really a problem for the user, it’s a problem for the ad products team who is fucking up making money. You know, their job.

Categories
Aesthetics Community

Day 650 and Reaching

Yesterday was quite a day. I decided to commit to doing a fundraise for chaotic my fund in public as it was my 39th Birthday

I would like to raise $5m for chaotic.capital’s rolling fund before I turn 40 next year. #5Before40 has a nice ring as a hashtag right?

If you would like to be a part of the fund grab a spot on my calendar and let’s discuss!

But lest you think I only thought about venture funds on my birthday I promise I did some celebrating with my family and friends. One of my favorite girlfriends came up to visit. She went straight from the airport to the food cooperative and stocked our half empty fridge with a full harvest of food.

A well stocked fridge

She then proceeded to cook a gorgeous dinner with grilled chicken and roasted cauliflower along with kale chips and a big mixed green salad with a shallot and fresh fig dressing.

Gorgeous, health and nourishing.

And lest you think the most important part of a birthday was forgot here is a picture of the most impossibly beautiful chocolate cake I’ve ever seen.

A chocolate birthday cake

I had a wonderful day filled with love and support. It’s only taken a couple decades but I am finally feeling like I’ve built a life where I feel secure, loved and cared for by those I’ve chosen to be in my life.

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 646 and Birthday Shopping

My birthday is next Tuesday and I’ve been using it as an excuse to browse my favorite cosmetic and clothing websites. I should treat myself right? No gift is better than what you select for yourself. Plus, I love a free gift with purchase. A birthday is often the anchor of any decent loyalty program so I’m justifying this as an exploration of current merchandising trends.

Sephora in particular has dedicated itself to a Birthday Gift franchise that women obsess over all year. If you are part of their loyalty program called Beauty Insider or Very Important Beauty (VIB if you spend $350) you get to chose a gift during your birthday month. There are a lot of other perks in the program but the birthday gift doesn’t require spending any of your hard earned rewards points and it’s free to join.

Sephora’s Loyalty Program Birthday Gift Options for 2022 for VIB & VIB Rouge included Laura Mercier, Tatcha, Amika, NEST & Olaplex

It’s a big deal for the brands to be selected as one of the gifts for the year by Sephora as it’s a great way to get sampling and visibility for twelve straight months. Plus Sephora kicks in on some of the hard costs. It’s one of the better gauges in the cosmetics industry of who is up and coming and desirable, but also has enough cachet that it drives desire around the program.

They generally offer one color cosmetic, one skincare brand, one haircare brand and a fragrance but it can be a bit mix and match depending on what trends are in the industry overall. And they offer up slightly fancier rewards for the $350 and $1000 spending tiers.

This year haircare brand Olaplex was so popular as a VIB gift that only January birthdays got the gifts causing some angst. That slicked back clean girl aesthetic bun TikTok wave and the brand’s IPO last year might have been too much demand for it to be a part of a loyalty program that is intensely scrutinized.

I have actually never used Olaplex as I’ve got low maintenance princess hair. I would have loved to try it in a sample gift just to see but the merchandising gods said sorry girl you ain’t a Pisces.

I’ll admit I was pretty bummed as it was advertised all year but I only realized it was sold out when I was able to begin my own birthday gift selection process. Guess I should have kept closer tabs on the beauty influencers.

Charlotte Tilbury Sephora Birthday Set with Pillow Talk mini Matte Lipstick and Mascara

Because I am VIB I had access to a gift that wasn’t initially pictured in the Birthday section. My theory is it got added in after the Olaplex debacle but this is just me putting on a tinfoil hat. I ended up selecting the Charlotte Tilbury gift. When I was the CEO of Stowaway Cosmetics we duped their best selling shade Pillow Talk many years ago.

I’d never actually purchased the original one from Tilbury as I simply had access to the original source contract manufacturer. I never tried it in matte as Stowaway’s original formula was a satin, so I thought “let’s select this” as my gift for the year. I thought it was a nice throwback to remember a time when I wasn’t a civilian but had access to all the cosmetics I wanted straight from the factory. And yes I miss it but not necessarily enough to go back. But I’ll let you know if I like the lipstick!

Categories
Startups

Day 645 and Progress

I was recounting a few pieces of work that have been ongoing to some family last night. Both items were the result of choices and trends I’d been following and cultivating for well over two years. One of the items was even set to debut next week. I had some demonstrable proof points that I was right and right long before anyone else took any notice.

I was extremely pleased to recount the long arc of work that had gone into these trend lines and how they were manifesting in successful investments and media attention now.

Usually when someone asks me what I do I have a tendency to stumble around a few more or less goofy bits. I am retired from working in propaganda. I am a house wife that manages the family budget (this works only with stay at home mom or high net work wealth managers). If I’m feeling chatty I explain the Thursday Styles Problem. If I’m not feeling chatty I’ll just say I’m an investor. Occasionally I will make an attempt to explain the founder to angel investor to venture capitalist career arc.

It’s not actually that easy explaining work that involves years of waiting. If you work for an established name brand venture capital firm it’s probably easier than being an angel investor with a small syndicate or seed fund. But even if you are Sequoia it still takes a decade on average to prove out your bets.

I’m thrilled to have concrete examples to point with any of my investment thesis points. I’m lucky that I have exposure to media so I occasionally get the chance to share what I work on online and in print. Not everyone has the skills to be as visible as I am. But it sure felt great to make some progress. And yes I promise I’ll share publicly when I can.

Categories
Community

Day 639 and Act Local

I grew up in a hippie college town that was fond of bumper sticker activism. Showing off your sense of humor and your political priorities was a fun thing to do with your Subaru Outback in the late nineties and early aughts before Facebook and the rise of social media.

A classic of the genre was “Think Global, Act Local.” I found this example on Etsy. And no I’ve got no idea what charity it ties back into.

Think Globally, Act Locally Bumpersticker

Maybe it was just less cringe to have this sort of thing on your car before we all spent half of our days yelling at strangers on the internet. I personally remember thinking Visualize Whirled Peas (a band from Austin) was a hilarious way to protest American war mongering as a teen. Of course, I still wrote Amnesty International letters at the time.

Now I’m not even sure who to donate money to at the end of the year as institutional trust continues to break down. Thinking globally is often the source of much anxiety. Currency collapses and the threat of nuclear war from Russia might be throw backs, but doomscrolling and feeling helpless is too modern. What is old is new again but in more potent anxiety inducing form.

So it was a bit of a relief to enjoy the “act locally” part of the classic bumper sticker this morning. Our local volunteer fire department had a pancake breakfast. Now as an adult my husband and I live outside of a completely different college town in the wider surrounding Gallatin Valley.

The rural (as opposed to city) county fire departments operate with a lot of local good will. They have a professionally trained but all volunteer force and cooperate with other districts through mutual aid frameworks. Practically, that meant a lot of college students taking advantage of living at the fire station to offset their costs while deepening ties to the community. A pretty ideal set up for a tight knit rural community. We get talent and they get skills and housing during their college years.

But calling them volunteers makes it sound less professionally run than the reality. I was impressed with not only the depth of knowledge of the entire department but also just how well maintained all of the equipment clearly was. Sure they probably cleaned stuff before letting their neighbors come in for a visit but everything was so shiny and new. I came away feeling a lot more secure about making a 911 call.

Now maybe that’s just function of meeting the fire chief and chatting with EMTS. And that’s probably exactly why they host these pancake breakfasts. But after two hours of touring equipment, and talking to everyone from the Medivac helicopter pilot to the youngest college kid on the squad, I felt like this was a team that has its shit together.

Now I’m actually excited to vote for a bond issue to get another fire truck or two! But in the meantime we dropped a few twenties into the boot on the table.

Pancakes and a fire boot for donations to the county fire department.

Categories
Politics Travel

Day 631 and Reunion

I normally spend a lot of time my husband. During the pandemic we got very accustomed to being around each other twenty four seven. We quite enjoy each other’s company so it’s been a life upgrade.

But occasionally we take longer chunks of time apart. It started as a deliberate effort, but now as the post pandemic world works itself out travel is starting to happen naturally again. We haven’t seen each other for two weeks. And completely organically.

And we couldn’t have had more diverse life experiences and seen more varied cross sections of America if we’d planned it. Alex was at an investment firm’s CEO summit in Santa Barbara while I was in Billings Montana taking wilderness medical incident first responder training. He was hobnobing with bankers while I was doing “stop the bleed” with wildfire fighters and EMTS.

When we reunited this evening after being apart, and for such disparate types of experiences, it was so much fun to compare notes. The types of concerns and the expectations for the good life couldn’t be more divergent for the two poles of people. And I am modestly afraid that as America polarizes and different industries code for different versions of America that it will be rare for different classes to intersect.

And that’s a real problem if bankers are so far removed from paramedics as to have entirely different interests and ideals for their shared country of America. It’s clearly possible to encounter all types of Americans across all classes but I’m not sure I’m optimistic about enough people making the effort to bring us all together.

Categories
Politics

Day 617 and Overnight

I plowed through a bunch of choring yesterday. Which apparently tuckered me out. I took maybe an hour nap before dinner. I had a little extra CBD beforehand and found myself drowsy as hell. I passed out sometime around 8:30pm.

Alas the napping and the early bedtime, if you can call just utterly losing consciousness “bedtime,” had consequences. I came to around 1am and found myself wide awake. Oops.

At first I wasn’t quite sure how to approach this unexpected moment of being lucid and energetic in the middle of the night. I toddled over to the bathroom to pee. I crawled back into bed. I debated if I should try to force the issue with an Ambien. But I didn’t have anything in the morning so I thought maybe I should take those sleep hygiene folks seriously and just do something till I get tired.

Of course, the thing I decided to do was read on my phone. I cleared a few back logged essays from my collections on my favorite reader app Matter. I logged into Bloomberg to check pre-market sentiment. I opened up the New York Times and read Queen Elizabeth’s obituary.

Around 2am it seemed clear I wasn’t sleepy at all. Whether from the back lighting of my phone or the five hours of sleep I’d logged earlier. So I said fuck it and opened Twitter. I dig deep into the feuding discourses of “God Save the Queen” versus the survivors of British empire. Monarchists loved their kindly grandmother and the Irish did their best to be polite about the genocide of it all.

If the sun never sets on the British Empire the doom scrolling through the celebration of the end of the longest reigning monarch seemed like the way to go out. But unsurprisingly there was a lot of darkness to be found in the pre-dawn sentiment. I tweeted a reminder to myself to explore how enclosure movements and anti-colonial “fuck the federales this is our land” historical context plays into the American political moment.

Eventually I got drowsy. I feel asleep around 5am just as the rest of the country was waking up. I slept till 9am or so.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 615 and Look Back

I recommend having habits from which one doesn’t deviate. I’ve come to appreciate how much the daily exercise of writing has come to provide a kind of scaffolding on which I hang the rest of my day.

But it can be easy to get lost in a habit too. I had originally started the act of daily writing as the habit. But I sometimes forget that there is more I can do on top of the foundation I have laid over these past eighteen months. I could integrate more of my past writing into the daily writing. I could do more to make it visible. I could do more to make it accessible. I could do more to make it durable. Perhaps now that writing every day is a firm habit I can expand on it.

In that spirit I am doing a little link round up on what might warrant a look back. A few posts that I thought were particularly good. A few posts that reflect some of the zeitgeist that I am digesting. And a throwback that some of my internet friends reminded were worth while.

The Thursday Styles Problem is probably one of my favorite essays. It’s about who knows what when and how that power flows.

I did a few write ups about masculinity and the internet. Two are about groypers. One is about cucking in the imagination of the American conservative. Or be careful as you can absolutely get brain worms from the internet.

I also had an essay on doing errands and the reality of living your daily life in a time of collapse. It pairs well with this bit about shrinkflation and consumer packaged goods.