Tag: Social Media

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Internet Culture

Day 561 and Community Building

The big move to Montana is only a few weeks away. I was expecting to be in a frenzy of preparation but I’ve been stuck in bed with a symptom flare so I’ve basically done nothing but ask for Twitter advice. Thankfully my community online is generous and available with their insights.

I’ve been lucky to participate in (and build, communities in spaces as varied as fashion, local politics, and disaster preparedness. My husband is also a community builder professionally. We both have a knack for finding our people and becoming a part of of all types of communities both in real life and online.

We are both excited and a bit nervous to move to a new town. Bozeman is a small town but not so small that it’s clear where we should start when we arrive. We’ve been told it’s a bit skeptical of outsiders. We’ve definitely received the advice to change our license plates immediately. It’s a bit intimidating to be honest.

There is a lot of amazing advice from my Twitter friends on becoming a member of a new community in real life. I would definitely check out the thread if you are feeling isolated or like you could be better connected to people around you. It’s helped me feel like I actually might be equipped to integrate into Bozeman smoothly.

I’m already putting the advice into the big Notion project management document that Alex has put together for our move. We don’t have too many close neighbors (just two on our road) but I am looking forward to introducing myself to them. I’m still debating what activities and organizations I will prioritize when we get there.

I am most interested in gardening, local agriculture and community preparedness efforts but I have enjoyed town politics in my past life. I served as an appointee on Manhattan Community Board 1 and loved it. There isn’t a lot of glamour in permits or licenses but it’s crucial work. So perhaps I can find a way to serve local businesses in a similar way.

Whatever happens, I cannot wait to invite people over to our home. It’s always the one on one connecting that weaves you into the fabric of a community and there is no better way to do that than being welcoming. So I will probably start by showing up, smiling and listening to my new neighbors.

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Chronic Disease

Day 559 and Stuck

I got stuck on the couch today. I’m not entirely sure why but I’m in the middle of a massive symptom flare. The pain is so acute and unrelenting that if I so much as sit up from bed I’ll get stuck in that position. I made the mistake of trying to eat lunch on the couch around noon and didn’t work up the capacity to get back into bed for over an hour.

This is becoming a theme on bad days. I’ll find myself upright for forty minutes completely unintentionally because moving, even to a more comfortable position laying down, is so painful I will put it off until I simply cannot remain upright anymore. It’s just that bad. Even the higher grade pain management isn’t doing shit. I’m just stuck in the pain until an even worse pain develops.

That’s probably a good metaphor for life. We will stay in an uncomfortable position until it’s so intolerable we simply must change. And I’d love to wax philosophic about that but I mostly mean it literally. If you’ve ever wondered how I got popular on Twitter, it’s simply because it’s the only thing I can do when I’m physically stuck in place by pain. I thank the internet Gods that this has been monetizable through investing or I don’t know what I would do.

You could almost surely correlate the number of tweets I send with the pain scale of my day. If I’ve tweeted more than 50 times on any given day it’s probably because I am over a 7 on the pain scale. It’s 2pm and I’ve tweeted 32 times today not including my DMs. I keep hopping the pain will abate enough that I can shower but it doesn’t show any signs of letting up today.

Frankly I’m just relieved it’s only my spinal pain and not anything else more exotic. Earlier this week I was dealing with being itchy and then I had a migraine that took 48 hours and several Imitrax to break. Regular old spinal pain is at least a recognizable and normal return to form. But until this nerve storm abates I’m stuck. At least until something worse comes along.

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Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 552 and Consumption

When I was emerging into my teens and early adulthood in the aughts I was fascinated by style. Coming from a small town in the Rocky Mountains, populated by hippies and techies, I’d had little exposure to fashion or cosmetics. Gore-Tex jackets, rainbow sarongs and Tevas had more purchase on the imagination than twin sets or pearls.

I didn’t chose a university known for its style either. I chose one known for crunching the numbers on our economy. My abiding interest in why we consume what we do never quite got around to being taste based. I followed fashion through export deficits, balance sheets and purchase orders. More back page of the Economist than Thursday Styles.

It was all an intellectual exercise for me. And it was mostly a numbers game. The cost of cotton and the trading flows of finished goods were much more legible to me than why a WASP enjoyed salmon colored pants.

I didn’t let an utter lack of taste, hell even exposure to taste, get in my way. I used a personal style blog hosted on WordPress (sound familiar) to comment on runway looks that were slowly emerging onto trade publications online. I used my comment sections to hold conversations with other enthusiasts. I was quite sure my opinion mattered. I guess I still am.

I very presumptuously emailed academic and authors like Valerie Steele and Virginia Postrel to share my enthusiasm. Much to my astonishment they wrote back. Eventually I stumbled into being their nominal peers, blending into the milieu of Balthazar breakfasts once I moved to Manhattan. Talk about peaking early. I’d achieved my life’s goals at 23.

But somewhere along the way it didn’t matter anymore that I lacked taste. No one had taste anymore. Our entire aesthetics stalled out sometime in the wake of the Great Recession. As I partied with the rest of Indie Sleeze crowd in my American Apparel deep v-necks, the end of distinct trends and looks was at hand. We just didn’t know it yet

Globalization and the internet gave us an amalgamation of tastes I’ve come to refer to the “Everything, Everywhere, All At Once” aesthetic. It’s all the same and it’s always been the same as long as our forever End of History Fukuyama moment continued. We’d reached terminal fashion. As the media class fractured into the creative class and struck gold in startup land, the center of gravity of taste didn’t just shift. It disappeared entirely. It was chaos and boring all at once.

No one sets agendas for style, or taste, or top down, or even bottom up aesthetic movements anymore. It’s just a stream of consumables made by fast fashion factories and sold out through Instagram and TikTok as the data miners and algorithms predetermined your desires before you’d even thought them up. Dystopian looks like getting exactly what you want.

It turned out that fashion blogs, once a nemesis for showing taste before it was ready, had been too slow. Blogging is so 2000 and late. The Everything Everywhere All At Once aesthetic is done with a look even before it starts. Because it has no beginning or end or middle.

Maybe we should have called it non-linear fashion. There are no early adopters or taste laggards any longer. It’s all very much a kind of quantum of sameness. Which is somehow even less exciting than a James Bond movie in the Daniel Craig era.

I stumbled onto a styles section piece about the disappearance of the fashion Czarinas in the wake of the Ukraine war. Global taste has collided with the brutal reality of kleptocracy. We’d ignored it for a decade or two but now it appears history has reasserted itself. Maybe that means fashion might come back? But as inflation runs rampant and supply chains crack we might be edging towards a new austerity. Which might make for a pleasant pre-war historic period.

I for one would love to know who the Neu-Weimar Coco Channel of the Boogaloo/World War 3 conflicts will be. I bet she’s an anorexic TradCath living in Dimes Square. And like her predecessor she’s definitely fucking a Nazi. Let’s pray she has taste that is more interesting than her sex life.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 548 and Shame

I’ve got a pit in my stomach. My throat has the constricted feeling of embarrassment that gets trapped in your gullet. I failed and lost money on something stupid. I tried to do a pleasant vacation sort of choice over a long weekend. A “nearby” Riviera town was supposedly within driving distance. I thought what could go wrong. Let’s go to the Ionian Sea! I briefly thought I could enjoy something like a regular person.

I said yes as everyone was so excited by the fresh air and the beaches. It will be healthy and fun! I was worried it would be without the basics I need to keep standing upright but I wanted to try anyway. Consistent air conditioning is really important to keeping the rest of my bodily system’s functioning. It’s a very Marie Antoinette need, but once my spine swells it can go very wrong very fast. Summers are hard for me.

My system begins to cascade within a pretty short window. About half a day. Eight hours without being able to lay flat for a break ended up fucking me up badly in this case. The “oh it’s close, just a three hour drive” ended up being a ten hour ordeal over badly maintained roads. I was sick to my stomach and in pain as we took hairpin turns and popped over potholes. I was in so much pain it was over a 10. It was “lose consciousness” levels of pain as my body knew I shouldn’t be awake for it. I was afraid it would get so bad I’d need a hospital. Instead I settled for opioids. Keeping out of the hospital was probably wise.

I hate needing those kind of drugs. The “your pain is a 10” drugs push me off the plane of reality by a few ecliptic degrees, and suddenly I can tolerate the pain and discomfort again. I understand how addicts get made now. It’s not real comfort. It’s synthetic but most people can’t tell just by watching. The fake relief looks real.

I’ve never felt tempted to take pain medicine recreationally. It’s usually only when a pain is too big for my reality that I tap out in defeat and take an opioid. It’s when reality crushes my soul as one variable starts to degrade the whole machine. I only use it to stave off collapse. And I was very close to collapse.

What is fucked up is that people like me off the axis of reality. The hazy hyper vibe’d unreal “reality” of encroaching nihilism is bop. Dystopia seems cool and consumable.

But it’s not an adventure for me. Living when sick is a daily dance with the devil who could use any chance encounter to end it all for you. The kind thing might be to stop fighting. But I rarely give up so I must enjoy the sticky Sisyphean crawl towards towards reality and the search for my own dignity.

I’m ashamed because I couldn’t make good decisions in that kind of pain. When the first hotel turned out to be a scam I happily laid down a card to stay till Monday at another hotel. Anything to get me relief. I just needed a safe cold place to heal.

It was a bad decision. The air conditioner didn’t work. I couldn’t get comfortable. I was sleeping in a dark sort of cold room as I couldn’t work up energy to go to the beach or even see the rest of the hotel. Not that it mattered as none of it was air conditioned anyway. I decided to go home after I had built up energy reserves back from sleeping for hours. I couldn’t tell you how long I passed out for but it might have been close to a whole day.

Alas I was again scammed for my efforts. The hotel clerk says no you paid for four days so you cannot get a refund even if you leave early. No refunds ever. No early checkout. No one cares if you are sick. Fuck her but I said hotel California for me. I was sick and needed safety.

I made some efforts to get receipts and documentation. I asked a receipt attesting that they wouldn’t let you cancel for any circumstance and that I was sick but it made no difference. Maybe I can take to the credit card or even the health insurance to show that I crashed. I’ll work it out on the backend.

I often wonder why I need special care. Surely I can try to do regular things like drive to the beach. But I couldn’t. I lost 48 hours to driving and bad air conditioning and pain. I didn’t have the health to stay at the beach. I needed to go back to the city with air conditioning.

I felt so stupid. I tried to fight to hold space that maybe I was a person that could do a vacation. That I was normal. And it was firmly corrected by reality. And then you think this is why I don’t go on vacation. The additional friction makes it a hell. It’s not a joy it’s a visit to hell.

I cut bait quickly this time.I’m ashamed at now much I must firmly maintain the no. No I don’t want to go to the beach. No I don’t have the energy got a full day road-trip. And definitely no on an empty stomach.

I feel like I’m not fun. That being friends with me is joyless because I can’t agree to fun things like a weekend at a beach. I find myself in tears having failed again at trying to do a nice normal fun thing. I ruined the weekend for myself and everyone around me.

Fun with me is being in a dark room. We watch television. Or maybe a movie. We make fun of a plot hole or bad casting. We sleep a lot. If we are at my home we do the chores. We keep up with the farm. There is no reason to turn consumption of recreation into a thing. It just hurts me. No cheap facsimile of an American vacation in a resort in a cheaper country.

That hideous example of colonial expectations of western domestic standards turn out to be required for a disabled woman. Air conditioning and short trips keep me alive. And at quite a cost. Since no one will refund me any of these damned scam hotels. I should have known better. It will probably take me a week or so to recover. And I’m so ashamed.

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Internet Culture Uncategorized

Day 541 and Doomscrolling

I love internet culture. While I’m an American, if there were citizenship for the internet I’d consider myself fully naturalized. Millennials aren’t natives like Gen Z, but we definitely moved online when we were kids. I’m a proud immigrant to the internet.

I engaged in one of the internet’s proudest exports yesterday. After the news about Roe v. Wade hit I was glued to my phone watching for tractions. I spent easily five or six hours Doomscrolling. I’m not proud of it but what else are you going to do when American implodes around a topic as emotional as abortion? Do something sensible like go for a walk. Nah.

Doomscrolling probably doesn’t have a an exact IRL analog. If town squares were still a thing that existed, maybe we’d crowd in and listen to people scream and heckle the town criers. Maybe it’s more like going to the mall and chatting up your peers.

Though I can’t really imagine anyone engaging in the kind of brawling that goes on when Doomscrolling turns reactive. And boy was it reactive when this mess hit America. People were feeling a kind of way. I saw various colors of shock. That surprised me as all I had felt for years was cynicism curdled into disgust. It has been clear where some demographics wanted the issue to land. We had taken too much for granted.

I’ve got an ambition to stay off the internet for a bit. But I know that my reflexive habits will put me back on Twitter if I don’t monitor my usage constantly. When I am anxious I like to surf sentiment. Taking a gauge gives me some sense of false control. That if I can just read the tea leaves right that maybe I’ll protect myself.

But it isn’t really that is it? You know at any minute you could be treated like a second class citizen. That unbearable cruelty could be casualty meted out on your body. And that so many people simply do not care about that pain. And fuck me if that doesn’t shatter your faith in humanity a little.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 536 and Keeping Tabs

I sometimes forget that other people read what I write. That makes me pretty comfortable just saying whatever I like in public. It’s not like anyone cares right? As someone skilled in the dark arts of marketing, I know getting anyone to pay attention to anything is a shit ton of work. Surely I am speaking into the void.

As I don’t actively promote my writing in any commercial way, my assumption is that the one Tweet I send daily with a link isn’t garnering a large audience. I know that I have a big presence on social media but I’m not a celebrity so I’ve never felt particularly scrutinized. No one is keeping tabs on me.

So I’m often surprised when someone has read what I’ve said. Not because it is a secret but because I know just how hard it is to get attention for anything in this world. And yet people do pay attention.

And since my husband loves to joke that I’m incapable of lying, I worry that I’ll get myself in trouble by saying so much of my truth online. If I’ve done something in my life the chances are good I’ll immediately discuss it. Which is a recipe for being main charactered.

Dissembling is not one of my talents. This isn’t to say that I’m not capable of crafting a narrative. I think facts exist in a context and I’ve got no problem articulating my worldview based on my own specific context. But telling an outright lie? There is a reason I don’t play poker. So I guess I might be stuck with saying my truth online as I’ve got neither the skills nor the talent to hide it. But if you are reading you are more than welcome to comment, email, @ Tweet me or find online.

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Internet Culture

Day 521 and Lots of Words

Today is the second day in #1000WordsofSummer. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a program run by Jami Attenberg. I am not using my daily writing exercise to “count” for it as they are separate experiences in my mind. So now I suppose I’ve really opted myself into a very prolific two weeks of writing.

I wanted to begin on my story when I first woke up. I had ideas for plot points and details running through my head. But I had some other work that is due on Monday so I put my head down and pushed through everything else so I could get to my science fiction.

I considered writing the thousand words first but I don’t like the idea of using writing to procrastinate for some reason. I’d prefer to get the main tasks down and out of the way. Then my fun writing gets it be a treat and serve as a carrot to get other deliverables done.

So I got my power point done and then I went straight into my short story. I did an edit pass and that somehow added in an additional 700 or so words as different parts got more fully realized. I sketched out some plot points and areas I wanted to explore. That was another 300. It was much easier going for second try than the first. W

hich is a very good argument for just doing something and not judging it. By the time you come round for the second try, you will have learned some tiny sliver of something. And that little something slowly over time makes it all easier. The struggle is the work.

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Internet Culture

Day 520 and A Thousand Words

I’ve done a lot of writing that isn’t for this blog recently. And it’s mostly been about DAOs and corporate governance. My talk for Consensus involved a fair amount of original writing and research. If you want a preview of it it just went up today. To be honest I was tempted to just repost here to count for today as it’s very good. I hope you will read it.

And then this morning I decided why not jump into Jami Attenberg’s #1000WordsofSummer. It’s a two week community exercise in putting the proverbial pen to paper. I’ve been wanting to play around with writing science fiction as it’s my favorite genre.

I got down a thousand words about a a woman who is a sentiment analyst for a a bunch of DAOs in the 2070s. I wanted to explore what an alternative corporate governance structure fork from hierarchical limited liability corporations into decentralized autonomous organizations might look like practically. I’m not sure if it’s any good but I had fun with laying out some thought experiments.

She was probably stuck with low yield yoga and step side quests which wouldn’t do much to make up for the loss of her analyst pay. Investment DAOs paid better than scientific ones. Anyone that contributed to price discovery remained well remunerated. That had been true in her grandma’s day too.

My protagonist is trying to take a break from her workload but still needs to earn some side hustle to make up for the shortfall. I take you through her thought process on what to do. It’s mostly an excuse to riff on how we will sell different kinds of our personal data but maybe also get more in return. Lots of theory of labor value goofing off that I hopefully find a way to put into an enjoyable narrative structure.

It seems a bit crazy to take on an additional writing experiment when I already opt into writing every single day. But this blog has really evolved into a personal space to explore how I feel and what I’m working on. It doesn’t really build on itself in a natural narrative fashion. So I’ll keep poking away at a thousand words of fiction and see what happens. I can’t promise I’ll publish it but I may just put it out there for fun.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 514 and Get Your Mind Right

Back when I was in my twenties Gawker was at the height of its power to anoint local stars in New York City. There was one personality I just thought was the funniest and most incisive judge of the human condition. She was woman whose slogan was “Girl, Get Your Mind Right!”

Tiona Smalls had a column on Gawker and eventually turned it into a burgeoning self help empire with tv shows and books. It looks like she is now a realtor so maybe internet game is fickle. I didn’t see any of her later pop culture work. But I did read her Gawker column religiously. I liked her no nonsense attitude.

The premise of her first book, which landed her the Gawker column, was that you’ve got to stop doing shit that isn’t getting you what you want. Hence “girl, get your mind right.” It was nominally a dating advice book. I mostly took it as a basic kind of self help.

I feel like I could use Tionna right now. I’m just emotionally so fucked by the last month. Granted I’ve made some pretty major life decisions in the last thirty days but it doesn’t feel like I should be so wrecked. I am absolutely blaming the flu for kicking up chronic inflammatory shit. Watch out for long Covid folks! Viruses have a weird tendency to go latent. But like really being sick isn’t an excuse to have a bad mental state. I’m practically professionally sick so this shouldn’t phase me.

I’m thinking of maybe going to Europe for a bit. Enjoy that the turmoil in the markets means things are a bit slow for work. While everyone figures out how much to freak out about a recession I might as well reset my central nervous system with some down time. But whatever happens I’ve got to get my mind right.

Categories
Internet Culture Media Politics

Day 482 and Vibe Shift

A month or so ago a piece written by a New York marketing executive titled Vibe Shift went viral among the chattering classes. The premise is that we are on the precipice of a cultural change that is upending everything from politics to fashion. And depending on your perspective, this shift might include crumbling dystopian decay or vibrant fuck it optimism. Or in the case of web3 absolutely both.

I think the Vanity Fair piece on the New Right is chronicling one of the first emergent vibe camps to emerge from the vibe shift. The article is a look at the art, intellectual environment and personalities of the “not quite conservative” new right. And it’s a largely positive even glowing send up.

If you believe the Citadel is a corrupt institution and moral moral crisis then the Vanity Fair piece should have been negative. It’s a surprise that it wasn’t. Not long ago we were subjected to intense narratives about the dangers of nRX neo-reactionaries and it’s infiltration of Silicon Valley. It was a real and urgent issue that the center of so much money and power might doesn’t align with the cultural values of media or academia. If you don’t speak this language the Citadel is code for the left leaning creative and cultural institutions like Hollywood, academia and media.

So why isn’t it a crisis any more that there is a new breed of influential “not quite” conservatives? If anything the right in America has shown itself to be capable of so much more than just boat parades and goofy hats. Some of these fuckers were expanding the Overton window on peaceful transitions of democratic power on January. It might actually be getting worse.

Except now the left fucking sucks too. Now I’m not justifying fascists. These Christian Nationalists are trying to roll back modernity and pluralism. Fuck them. They fuckers don’t even have a demographic majority. So it pains when I say the vibe shift is showing the left as the worst version of themselves while the right is showing a new cultural ascension.

To a lot of normal moderate people the left looks controlling, scolding, frigid, and conformist. Everything from mask politics to gender relations has started to make the left look insane. It’s entirely rational people would be seeking a vibe shift for something more welcoming.

My theory is we are about to see a massive resurgence of affection for all kinds of conservative hobby horses. Especially of vibes that used to be the province of the traditional left. Everyone is sick of being shamed while they go about living their lives. And whoever wins that vibe war will win America.