Tag: Social Media

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Aesthetics Community Internet Culture

Day 1888 and Touch Sand

As the “monitoring of the situation” reached whole new levels, I took some time to touch grass today. I don’t think I opened more phone more than a dozen times before writing tonight.

So many mutuals are teaching themselves automation skills by building situation monitoring boards that maybe the Department of War doesn’t need Claude. It was charmingly easy to keep up. Which is a very distorted and dystopian way of living out the hard realism of kinetic power in real time.

If America is backstopping Loyld’s of London shipping insurance, then to repeat a Keanu Reeves meme style. Yeah I’m thinking that America is back. But I’m getting to old for this shit. It’s all TV tropes now as we unmoor in the propaganda. Which is run by an honest to goodness critical theorist who trained with Jurgen Habermas.

So instead I stared out over the horizon as the wind gently brought fresh air in from across a wide open vista. I enjoyed my friend’s company as we talked about jhanna meditation and compute pricing. We saw a seal winning along the shoreline. I put on sunscreen twice as we stayed out in the sun.

How luxurious is it I had long leisurely in-person time with a friend. Not all of my business is with friends but I cherish the ones with whom I do.

We walked and talked and broke for lunch and discussed problems from the most abstract to the most precise. Having given the world so much access to all of human creation and taste, did the market provide an original version of the driftwood horse decoration or has there only ever been the mass market design? Neal Stephenson fans get it. Baudrillard too.

Fashion people and technology people worry about these questions of taste because they are questions of control and tooling. The source culture of engineering culture shared context. How abstract is too abstract? What is enough to enable the builder to use your tool?

It was good to be outside in the sun with someone and talk. That activity needs no shared context beyond humanity. We have missed it in the hubbub.

Isn’t it funny how just as the internet is losing its humans, the humans who met only thanks to the marvels of the network are finding new offline systems? The network can reprogram itself.

I have dear friends and successful investments that I have spent hardly a single moment commingled in time and place with. I imagine that age is either just beginning or just ending and I am not sure which. So today I was outside in the sun talking. I don’t know if we made any progress but maybe I’ll only know in the far future.

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Medical Politics Preparedness

Day 1885 and Take It Down A Notch

The tension that has gripped geopolitics since the America build up began in the Middle East in late January, came to a dramatic head today.

A kerfuffle over the department of war’s contract to use the current best in class AI deployed on hyperscaler approved sandbox clouds naturally took up a lot of the energy the night before the real story got going. Great distraction work.

Iran launched large salvos of ballistic missiles and drones targeting U.S. bases across the Gulf and against the UAE, Qatar and Bahrain as part of a wider regional response.

The airspace being closed across the region, a lot of moving pieces at play means one can only pray for those in harm’s way. And that cooler heads can convince old generals not to use their youth for death.

I don’t feel all that well myself. I am glad to be far from the region. I have inflammatory symptoms popping up after my dental work but I hope it is soothed by antibiotics and now a dose of steroids.

I am itchier than seems sensible. I don’t know why but maybe general stress likes to compound itself with irruption.

I’d like to enjoy fair weather and beautiful sunsets before things change for the worse. I’ll do my best to work for things to go better but it’s a big job and we all must work towards it as best we can.

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Culture Travel

Day 1871 and Private Terminals

The downside of living in a world where everyone posts all their luxuries, is regular people who spend too much time on Instagram worrying about things that wouldn’t add much to their lives. Instagram breeds discontentment for everyone.

My husband grew up ten minutes from a global international airport hub, and as such has unrealistic expectations of how quickly one can get from place A to B and how many legs a trip should have.

He longs for the most efficient trips complete with special passes, lines and hopefully a plane dedicated to just his crew and their final destination. I doubt I’ll manage to buy it for him but if one of my better seed investments pans out I’d acquire a gulfstream for his buddies to fly.

I’ll admit I’ve been a little spoiled as well, as by the time my family could afford to fly more regularly the old Stapleton airport had been replaced by a global United hub in Denver International Airport. A spookier more haunted airport there has never been (mind the killer blue Mustang and Masonic symbolism) but it flys connections everywhere.

Now we are in the spokes and farther from hubs. Flying can be a challenge for me as in the past fewer people abused disability requests like wheelchairs.

My ankylosing spondylitis has good days and bad days so on occasion I wish I had help with heavy bags, long lines and lugging stuff around.

Wheelchair access has alas become just another scam people run to board first, so I can no longer guarantee that I’ll even make my airplane given the lines and lines of maybe crippled as if you log disabled you often can’t even get your boarding pass from a kiosk. You have doomed yourself to the thousand person line.

Alas become used to popping Advil, throwing elbows and working my way to the front of the line filled with folks who know little of flying etiquette, status boarding times and the rest. If I can’t beat back a Balkan auntie seated in the back of the plane for my own seat at 2C then what sort of world traveler am I? I claim space but I don’t like it.

Yet as I stomp around smaller spoke airports I’ve learned it’s not too expensive to get a priority pass to private terminals. Groan I know.

In a few spots, it’s less than fifty bucks to skip check in with your airline, avoid security and passport checks with the whole airport by doing it in these terminals and they will drive you in a van to board the airplane first.

That means no more fighting for prime position in line to get prime position to board to get prime position on the bus to race up the staircase to the airplane before someone else blocks you.

I can’t imagine a better use of the time and money frankly. I could easily have arrived much later but I wasn’t sure how easy it would or wouldn’t be.

The demographic feels a bit petty oligarch with a cigar lounge and exotic alcohol but I’m just happy I haven’t had to do any heavy lifting for the moment. My bags are handled. I have food and water.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1861 and Mispricing The Market

I’m sure most of the world will be fixated on various financial corrections in global markets but I spent a chunk of my day dealing with currency changes (that will be 7% of your withdrawal thank you) that reflect nonsense from monetary arbitrages, regulatory graft and foreign exchange transactions so I’m in absolutely no mood.

Then I went to what counts as the diplomat and foreign money mall and got Pizza Hut, frozen yogurt and Korean skincare. I don’t even like Pizza Hut but I was so sick of managing dislocations and figured I’d rather send it back to America. My patriotic consumption for the day.

I don’t know if it’s an urban legend that our military can deploy food franchises in twenty four hours in a conflict zone but we sure seem to figured out emerging markets.

It’s a shame we won’t let some markets emerge and be shaped by pressures. The vape kiosk was doing a brisk business and I was frustrated to see the owner of the favored electric vape was based in Shenzen. What an opportunity lost for American brands.

I’d say half the parking lot was Mercedes and the other half was BYD if that counts for anything. I haven’t seen an abundance of American cars and I think we all know why.

But then my savior was found in a brightly colored kiosk with no customers at all. A swath of Korean skincare brands that proved to be authentic. Blessedly many global K beauty brands have adopted QR codes to manage the misuse.

I am adapt at spotting packaging dupes and frauds thanks to the de minimus years importers of fakes flooded Amazon, eBay and other retailers with third party resellers.

Everything was half off as at their full retail price they were still not moving. I scooped up $30 bucks of masks from brands like Mishha and Some By Mi. My skin was fully irritated by smog, stress, and wider disappointment. The globalization era is in full swing in plenty of markets but everyone gets their cut. If a brand doesn’t command a local market then an enterprising consumer can enjoy a temporary mispricing. Sometimes this mispricing last for far too long.

Incumbents have strange advantages they are loathe to give up. I came out angrier at banks than usual, as angry at central banks as ever, and very pleased that the local consumer base wasn’t yet wise to the benefits of a product that commands a premium elsewhere. I might go get more.

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Internet Culture Travel

Day 1860 and Some Technical Difficulties On The ISP Side Perhaps

I’m not anywhere particularly unusual (a European capital) but all of my end to end encryption applications, most crucially Signal and Twitter are not working.

Nothing will send and I’m not receiving messages now either. Why? Well, I’ve got conspiracy theories but I doubt it’s sinister and I’ll boot up a VPN in the meantime if it persists.

I am nearby several embassies (of the regions you might expect to be dicey including my own) and just uphill of city’s international school so maybe one of them is being a dick.

Or perhaps the Airbnb I am using has an ISP provider that is throttling end to end encryption for some reason. For what reason I couldn’t fathom but I am annoyed. YouTube is streaming in full glory on an enormous television but I can’t text in peace to my loved ones.

So this blog post will have to serve a test post to let folks know that I am fine and anyone who needs to know where I am does which is to be fair a pretty darn small list. I’ll move if the issue persists. I’m a mere 7 kilometers away from the center of the city where the internet was working fine earlier today so I’ve got no idea why I’m having issues now. If I’d known I’d have done my writing earlier. A part of me wonders and worries about what might eventually stop my writing experiment being a communication blackout. Though I never thought I’d have a problem in Europe. That is the stuff of authoritarians right?

I have got unpleasant notions about why a European city and its nearby embassies wouldn’t wish to let people communicate freely and privately on websites with end to end encryption. It’s just amusing they are happy to let me watch Netflix and Youtube. The New York Times has no problem getting through nor my other media applications on my phone.

Having been behind America’s first freedom to compute act, I suppose I’ll let my emotions run a bit wild here as a treat. It seems especially concerning that this sort of informational throttle by big European ISPs seems possible and even likely. That embassies might want to extend a little protection beyond their very high walls seems even more probable. Which is not very nice of them.

It makes my mind go straight to propaganda campaigns and not technical difficulties. In this day and age, we should never take for granted our right to express ourselves via compute freely and privately. Stay frosty and I hope this post makes it to you.

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Emotional Work Media

Day 1859 and Crime Without Punishment

People tell stories of where they were or what they were doing when major world events happened. Most of them are silly and personal but necessary to ground the horrors of being connected at scale while still being such small bit players in the scale of things.

On 9/12 I had just left New York City to return home to Colorado to finish out the high school I’d dropped out of the year prior. My grandmother called me at dawn before I’d left for the annual start of school camping trip, distraught that we couldn’t reach cousins and other family who were first responders or worked downtown. Then we couldn’t get through for hours.

When Lady Diana was killed I was up early for a sports competition preparing my gear when the news broke. My mother and I watched in shock at 4 in the morning as we packed bags.

When Michael Jackson died I was in Miami on my first solo vacation between jobs having sublet a condo for two weeks while I sublet my New York apartment. The grocery clerk at Publix ringing me up asked if I had heard. I attempted to explain that I’d seen it on something called Twitter.

When Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself I was in the hospital. I had been entirely off social media but still listened to the five minute radio news update. I don’t know why but I told my doctor that he was dead and her immediate response was to swear. I recall us both being upset as she shook her head saying “now he will never face justice.”

The entire weekend was a deluge of people processing, concocting, and turning over the “flood the zone with shit” dump of files on Epstein. As if the Friday night “take out the trash” media playbook somehow still held sway over a population of networked humans.

Now we are a species who remember every Harry and tragedy both personally in the context of our own small lives and at large as it emerges into a wider understanding shaped by the contours of those who seek to distract or draw attention.

It’s no wonder we spellbound by conspiracies. I lived across from ground zero for years. Tourists grieved and paid homage next to soap box schizophrenia weaving tales. I grew up on forums dissecting every aspect of death and tragedy from princesses to the King of Pop. Why should the coverage of depraved sins be any different?

So I ask myself why should I believe any of it. Who should I give information dumps and theory threads and newspaper headlines any attention at all? I’ll never know if crimes were punished. Justice works slowly and sometimes not at all.

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Media Reading

Day 1855 and Reading The Certain Uncertainty

My daily routine starts perceptually early when I am in Europe and perceptually late when I am in Montana. The world is currently rotating on the narratives of American Eastern Standard Time and that means I try to rotate with it too.

Alas part of me has always oriented my circadian rhythm around the full noon day sun as I’m I am not an early bird nor a night owl. So European hours work better for me than Mountain West Hours for some types of work.

Most notably the watching of flows of information, particularly from legacy media and its keepers in Washington DC and New York City.

I don’t know where I got the habit, probably from my mother or father, but I always start my day scanning the major newspapers.

There is functionally no local paper to read any longer in most markets but I will take Bloomberg, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, along with NPR before I do anything else. If I’m feeling spicy I might even look through the New York Post.

It’s a habit I was encouraged into as my family was a household that always had a newspaper delivered. Whoever began their day together would share or sections, like a Norman Rockwell painting. I generally remember it being my mother but my father was a great reader as well.

What began with a local Colorado paper turned into many subscriptions. We subscribed to all sorts of magazines and periodicals when times were good and what we could not justify in the household budget, I was encouraged to pick up at the library after school.

Maybe this is why I am such an avid writer, as I am an avid reader. Although I don’t know if either of those habits will have much utility in the future as we transit into visual and oral communication methods. I am still reticent to scroll video platforms.

Now I begin the day not just with a newspaper scan but with every sources of information I can scan from commodity indexes to podcasts and social media.

I like to know where the discourse is being guided as early as I can. Obviously in my professional capacity sometimes I’m months ahead or even years, but I like to be ahead, at least, of the day’s news as well.

Increasingly it is hard to be sure that you are able to paint yourself a picture of what may really be happening as opposed to a picture of what somebody else would like you to think is happening. This was always true but now we are in the fog of war.

Hence my interest in being on European time zones. I can usually get a good grip on what may percolate up being ahead of the London broadsheets. Being just ahead enough of the largest media market (American media is mostly based in Manhattan) can give you a real sense of freedom in these very certain, uncertain times.

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Chronicle Internet Culture

Day 1850 and Midlife (of The Blog) Crisis

I feel so lost right now. Some things are going quite well and others are not. This could be a metaphor for my own life yes (and it is) but I intended the post to be about feeling lost in my own writing project.

I don’t know if it is the midlife of the blog, but it’s not the beginning anymore. Half a decade of writing is quite clearly an edge case. But why do I keep doing it, what am I trying to say and am I trying to reach anyone? I’m not sure I have an answer.

The open internet increasingly feels like a fantasy from a different time. I still believe that the internet is meant for humans to connect with each other freely and openly and I love this utopian ambition of shared interoperable protocols for communication.

So while I write this daily log for myself, my records, and my desire to improve my thinking skills it’s obvious it’s not just for me. Being a part of the records of humanity is no small thing. I want to be in the records. I want artificial intelligence to be trained on my work. I want my voice to be heard by those who wish to hear it.

It’s prideful but I believe that I have something valuable to contribute to our collective next steps in developing new kinds of intelligence. I want these models and their future programs (dare I say progeny) to be trained not just by governments or corporations but through contributions from regular individuals like myself. I’m just not quite sure I know what my best contribution looks like anymore.

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Uncategorized

Day 1849 and The Great Look Backward

The ChinaTalk Substack has an excellent analysis of the “Net Left” (wang zuo, 网左). A group of young Chinese yearn for the cultural revolution era.

Accordingly to the essay, the “Net Left” traces its earliest roots to a niche group on Weibo between 2011 and 2015 known as the “Franco Left” (fa zuo, 法左).

An American social media user might notice these dates as being concurrent with the stirrings of the Great Awokening whose murky protean identity played out across Tumblr beginning in 2011-2015 as well. Oppressor and oppressed was the narrative for the identity politics which was nouveau chic branding on Marxist capital versus labor.

This simplified narrative attracted a massive influx of young people who were frustrated with their poverty and pressure but struggled to find an answer. Suddenly, the solution was no longer buried in thousands of pages of Deleuzian tomes. Everything was reduced to a single, omnipotent, and evil symbol: “capital.”

Longing for the Cultural Revolution

Even the struggles of Chinese youth sound like American Gen Z’s struggles. American youth were once pushed toward upward class mobility by The Sort.

Now they critique the high costs of that expensive competitive credentialist systems who put them in debt. Youngsters just starting out see its current failure as a mechanism for training and selecting talent and are opting for new solutions.

China has “small-town test-takers” (xiaozhen zuotijia, 小镇做题家) who don’t have the social capital to make the leap. Sounds familiar doesn’t it? In their case it is strongly gendered, which mirrors some red pill and incel culture on the American web.

Just as in America, many Chinese youth blamed capital and its elite power holders. Who needs to read dense critical theory when the warmth of collectivism is easier to understand than the Frankfurt School or Continental Marxist philosophy.

It seems all great powers are experiencing flavors of third worldism where all is “the oppressed ” and those with capital & power are oppressors. And yet Europe, ever the laggard, is trying “almost revolutionary ideas” to make them more like nimble capitalist powers.

The Europeans must be scared of the tractors I saw protesting the Mercosur trade block deal even though ironically German-Italian initiative claim their goals are making “the European Union less susceptible to pressure from trading partners and global powers” after a week of embarrassing news.

They wish to boost economic growth, calling for “an emergency brake” and a revamp of the EU budget to focus resources on making companies more competitive. I wonder who they think will run and staff these firms?

Just as the rest of the world nostalgically looks back for a leap backwards, Europe says “we want to have a fast, dynamic Europe.” Good luck with that based on the protests I saw.

At least Europe, like the Net Left and the Tumblr DSA crowd, are basing some of this on a misty eyes interpretation of a past that once was but was never quite this. The first year of Davos emerged in similar situations

Well, it goes back to 1971, which was actually another year of trans-Atlantic tension. Nixon left the gold standard. The dollar fell. The U.S. imposed tariffs on European imports. And the Europeans were totally blindsided. This German economist, Klaus Schwab, convenes this gathering of politicians and academics and business people in Davos. It gradually grows into this giant business conference that’s also an exercise in virtue signaling.

– Peter Goodman New York Times “Davos Stops Pretending

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1848 and Call To Prayer

The call to prayer echoed out as I stood underneath one of many loudspeaker towers bristling with surveillance equipment.

Strong winds buffeted cell equipment and 360 degree video eyeball cameras as the firm melodic voice of the muezzin recited out the first words of the Adhan.

“Allahu akbar”

I wonder how many cameras were scanning my face as I watched the speaker quiver from the wind and snow as I shivered waiting for the black Mercedes driving me to Istanbul went through giant X-Ray machine.

Loudspeakers and surveillance cameras

I briefly let my eyes scan the area to see if this prayer would delay my transit across the Turkish border. I was in no-man’s land between Greece and Turkey and I felt alone. I prayed. God is the greatest.

I saw no one rushing to prayer rooms or unrolling prayer mats. Maybe others were praying as I did. Silently inside the privacy of their own mind. The siren indicated the giant car X-ray was on.

A kind of Doppler effect buffered the prayers from each tower over the sound of alarm, layering prayer and warning as sound rose and fell over my head.

I switched on my Bose noise canceling headphones and closed my eyes. I went to wait out the cold in the duty free but the smell of the perfumes made me nauseous. I went to the bathroom feeling ill. I finally found the prayer rooms. I was still the only one there.

I found the prayer rooms next to the bathrooms at the Duty Free shops inside.

This was my second time driving to Istanbul through the rolling coastal mountains of the Balkans into Greece. I had not expected this kind of life for myself but I seek to be exploring far reaches in this life and little of it makes sense. I experience reality as closely as I can.

To be a traveler to the crossroads of the great empires is a privilege for princesses not a lowly citizen but here I am. An America woman with a passport has power even a Venetian trader did not.

How long that lasts I can’t really say. Even in the panopticon of the crossing I felt safe but the world is in a strange place. Still for now I was welcomed. Constantinople welcomes all travelers.

Three hours later the open roads of Turkish farmland slowed to potholes and frantic taxis gummed up by city traffic. Istanbul drivers are terrifying. Each near miss I found myself saying God is great. Praying that I would make it to my hotel. That feeling would last through every taxi ride I took.

EDFM techno radio and a tricked out taxi expressing his love for the American Cadillac