It was a busy week. I felt physically well through most of it, but yesterday and today I am struggling. I’m in bed with a migraine that I think I accidentally kicked off by enjoying a quiet walk on sunny snowpack.
Amusing that people think we don’t get enough sun for solar power
While I prefer to have illness strike on a weekend, I feel irritated that I often get my personal time used up by health issues. I very much prioritize using my good hours for work.
Which on that note, I’d love for folks to check out a bill in Montana to secure a right to compute. What started as an idea has now officially been introduced into the legislative process. It’s a big victory to have this under consideration.
The paper of record just doesn’t know what to make of a political constituency that it has been determined to view as a billionaire bad boys club. And so after almost a decade of hostility between media and Silicon Valley, it is clear the vibe shift has come in the house style at the New York Times as it is dedicating a lot of ink to “Tech Right” and how it views the world.
The editors appear to sense the shift of power. And with new beats come new talent. The Grey Lady has hired an opinion columnist James Pogue who actually does reporting with these elusive new right and tech right figures.
Old timer readers might appreciate that this new talent shares a name with a past technology columnist. Pogue. David Pogue reviewed gadgetsfrom 2000 to 2013.
Despite being millennial, James Pogue is an old school reporter. His popularity derives from his deep reporting. He picks up the phone and talks to people. He shows up to events and reports on what he sees. He does it with verve and style but lets his subjects speak for themselves.
If you enjoy learning how the media sausage gets made Isaac Simpson has an interview with James Pogue on his newfound status, his reporting style and how he ended up at the center of the political and cultural moment.
It is here I do full disclosure myself and say I’ve been interviewed by himtwice and we have social relationship that includes being on a very similar professional and social circuit. Because he actually goes to report on things in person we’ve seen a lot of each other over the years. A reporter grows with their beat.
If you are interested in what establishment media has to say about this new power base of new right, tech right and a rising counter cultural elite and prefer your news to be deeply reported then make yourself familiar with James Pogue and his work.
He has a nuanced understanding of the personalities, always his homework, and incredible access to his sources. I guess this is what happens when you ask questions and then let your subjects speak for themselves. If anyone has the secret to the media rebuilding its trust with readers my money is on James Pogue.
The one thing that really unites the American west, but in particular the Rocky Mountain West, is our independent streak. We take our rights seriously.
We don’t like being told what to do by the government. I hope to contribute to this tradition in my own efforts as a citizen. I’m pleased to support a bill that guarantees Montanan’s right to compute.
Sen. Daniel Zolnikov has officially introduced SB 212, the Right To Compute Act, to the #mtleg.
This bill will ensure Montanans’ rights to free expression and property are protected in the 21st century, in addition to helping position Montana as a world-class destination for AI and Data Center investment.
Here’s what it does:
1: Establish the Right to Compute: The legislature makes it clear that privately owning or making use of computational technologies for lawful purposes is protected as an aspect of fundamental rights to free expression and use of property.
2: Create a New Policy Framework: Restrictions on the ability to privately own or use computational resources must be limited to those demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling state interest in public health or safety.
3: Balance Interests: Provides mechanisms for policymakers to address real harms to public health and safety posed by the application of new computational technologies, while also ensuring that regulations do not excessively burden the Right to Compute.
I feel like I’ve been discussing this issue forever but in reality we are in the first innings of how artificial intelligence will change our lives. And it has real possibilities for making many aspects of our very human lives better.
I don’t want this technology (which is again just math) being restricted by the federal government or dominated by a handful of corporate behemoths who can comply with endless regulations. Compute is for the people.
Twitter has become an unmonitored Wild West of content. This is mostly good for those of us looking to understand the world “as it is” and not as we wish it to be, but requires a certain cognitive security not everyone is prepared to engage in. What was once kept to the dark corners of 4Chan splutters up.
We witness more violence than we did during its “trust and safety” years. Thanks to algorithmic chaos quite a bit of gore, pornography and death will regularly hit main feeds.
A friend of mine (whose line of work would put her in a position to know) has a theory that Zoomers will cross into physical world violence more easily than past generations. We have long debated as to why and how it will manifest but it’s already begun.
Being raised in digital always- online mobile environments means their reality is more malleable. And yes the internet is real life. We live, we love, we hate, we play and we work online. But what of violence? Are we prepared for that crossover?
Digital life has given them an immense sense of freedom to act without consequences because the virtual world is still sequestered from some consequences. And unlike millennials, whose sense of The Real and the Matrix, was anchored by a physical consensus reality, I’m not convinced this will be true for all Zoomers.
If you die in the Matrix you die in real life
We have already seen the maturation of bringing Internet identities to our regular life physical world. Violence has always been there lurking, but it is now bursting forth and I believe it will only become more prevalent.
Today I read news stories of two separate incidents of violence that I can only read as Zoomer Internet Identity Violence. Be warned they are both upsetting and confusing for non-internet natives.
If you die in the real world perhaps you live on in the Matrix of the infinite internet. But this is not an end that we should wish for our civilization or for our Zoomers. Be prepared to see more of this.
I’ve been well controlled though my disease is not “inactive” or in remission. I manage it as it’s worth it to me to have a quality of life that includes working in technology as I want to be a part of making the tools that enable material progress in health.
Seeing things go in the wrong direction when my life is going in the right direction had a clarifying effect on me.
Not that I’ve been unaware that I must work at my health but rather it’s hard to always be working at health as it’s a matter of survival. But when you see a change in the data you act. I got serious and immediately went into action.
I’m so lucky to have to have access to an incredible community of biohackers. That I can ask someone who is studiously pursuing health in public is the best of the internet. I get the benefit of Bryan Johnson’s open sourcing his work. I’m doing an experiment with HBOT or hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy and I learned from him I need it to be 2 atmospheres to be effective. This helps me plan and find hard chambers.
I can use Perplexity and Claude and even make my own personal assistant trained on my condition and my data is the remarkable thing.
I’ve found a new IL-17 inhibitor that looks to have twice the efficacy of my current one at the same dose. It was only approved in Europe but finally came on the American market. I was able to discuss it with my doctor immediately after going down a short question sequence on perplexity. You have so much power to improve your life now.
Shopping
I’d like to improve my V02 max and cardiovascular health in a way that works around my psoriatic arthritis and ankylosis. I have significant fatigue from the pain and obviously high impact isn’t in the cards for me. But I can try something like a DeskCycke. It’s even possible for me to do HIIT training with one. So I bought one. My goal is to improve my V02 by 10% in 8-12 months which shouldn’t be hard as mine is absolutely awful
I was extremely frustrated with an autoimmune reaction that got out of hand over New Year’s. I don’t care for taking corticosteroids as their side effects are quite severe even if they can be the only option when an immune response refuses to calm down.
To repair the damage, I went to a holistic clinic that offers a range of services like infrared saunas, IV therapies, cryotherapy and hyperbaric chambers.
I’ve got 8 more ahead of me along with some glutathione and vitamin IV drips so I’m hoping to be ship shape soon.
News and Sundries
The Chinese venture ecosystem has funds engaging in some suboptimal behaviors. They are clawing back personal assets, banning them from services and putting founders on no fly lists. Which is needless to say not the best way to encourage innovation.
Mark Zuckerberg is taking a new tack with speech at Meta. The company employing content moderators for what is true is out and enabling Twitter style community notes are in.
It would be helpful for most media readers to understand the history of the news business and its relationship to war and finance.
For all the standards and ethics and best practices we expect from professional newsrooms (and they do have conduct standards), the history of media isn’t a clean narrative America went to war thanks to Yellow Journalism in the Spanish American War. If you think the Pulitzer is a badge of merit wait till you learn its history and financing.
You have probably lived through multiple media scandals. Millennials remember the neoconservative “weapons of mass destruction” story thanks to notably terrible editorial decision at the New York Times.
When someone says you are in a media bubble or on an information island, recall that these systems made up of people with varied interests, ambitions and aims.
I began my review of my “round up” for the year post today. I was going post by post dredging memories and taking notes by hand. I’m embarrassed to say it took me almost 7 weeks of post scrolling to realize I was going through 2023 and not 2024.
Now you might argue that I’m tired as it’s been a long year, but just how crazy do things got to be when time is so punctuated with “happenings” that it’s genuinely hard to remember even the most shocking of events?
How is it that wars, elections, and major technological breakthroughs are just the daily happenings? Can it be that this much travel is required to do business? How long have we been living through this acceleration in politics and technology?
I want the narrative through lines of life to be more comprehensible. It is however clear that we are in a roiling period of chaos and even as I may remain ahead of some aspects I’ll always experience a trend multiple times.
Things that were huge this year were trends last year and were mere subcultures the year before that. Such is how information propagates in a networked world. I’m not even fully saturated on my own thesis.
Twitter is in the middle of a multi-day long information war ostensibly over foreign worker visas in America. It’s about visas in the same way that Gamergate was about “ethics in journalism” if you catch my drift.
The similarities are interesting. It’s a fight over who’s interests are included and prioritized in a lucrative space. If gaming makes money and had that much vitriol involved imagine how much worse it is at the scale of a nation. All power struggles become culture war online.
American, being the aging but dominant geopolitical entity on the planet, is a popular place to be. So naturally the fight for who benefits from America is gnarly as fuck and has a lot of racism.
Who has rights and who benefits from them sounds much grander than video games or fashion but who decides what is “in-group” is existential.
As we experience the Great Reshuffle over the next decade or two, the question of who is protected in a nation state couldn’t be more potent. And human nature means we are viewing it with as much sense as a gaggle of fashion editors. Being part of the in group in America is as ugly a business as any.
I really tried to stay out of discourse on Twitter over Christmas break, alas being only human I stupidly decided to wade into discussions about American talent and our disgracefully broken immigration and visa system. It was a mistake.
Naturally people are pissed. The whole thing feels like it was designed to manufacture a schism between factions of the Republican Party as it touched some very raw nerves.
The “precariat” of lower middle class professional Americans took sucker punches from anonymous account and also Vivek Ganapathy Ramaswamy for having bad cultural values which has affected our willingness to compete for excellence.
If we had a similar cultural figure in white American that said something equivalent we’d probably get the same backlash as no one likes to hear told that they need to work on themselves. And in general people definitely don’t want to hear their flaws from someone who acts like their betters.
I think the bigger question is how is it that we found our values of hard work and achievement degraded. What has happened in our schools and in our workplaces that we are not aspiring to better ourselves. That’s where the heart of the issue is most tender and for good reason.
