Tag: Status

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Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1762 and New Nodal Points

I suspect that if I am any good at seeing the future it’s because I enjoy touching the present so much.

I think it’s a fools errand to professionalize “the spark” of active players meeting and exchanging information. Not to say that working at your game is wrong. You should work at it. But know what game you are playing.

I’m experiencing a kind of multi-modal view of my own focus and how it can be turned into more time touching reality. I know it sounds silly but the verbiage of the moment is enabling in strange ways.

I don’t always like consensus. I need to experience the consensus myself before I’ll join up. But I love to be first. I love being your first fan. I love being first to a new trend, narrative or aesthetic. I want to see a thing first.

To engage with others in this market place of ideas and trade in our knowledge for our own priorities, is for me, the stuff of life. I love a market. What is the mood of now so I can find others who might understand the possibilities of tomorrow. Every angle counts

I do think it’s all up for grabs future at the moment. I am leaning into some personal weirdness partially for my own happiness but partially because I think maybe this strange node of “people who want to communicate that they value beauty” to the world will be a vector for finding interesting people working on what is going to explode next.

Put out a little value for people with your own skills and maybe that is the node through which you have the opportunity to see what they see and in return you both learn more together.

I am trusting when everything goes up in “the churn” I enjoy picking up new skills. I am enjoying turning myself in a new direction. I think it might actually get me to my original goals. To invest in founders building their weird chaotic nodes of next should be.

Categories
Culture Reading

Day 1758 and Fluctuation in Society

I was ordered into bed for a couple of days by not one but two doctors. As I mentioned yesterday, a small incision for testosterone pellets must have let in a small amount of bacteria.

Maybe we didn’t pick the correct antibiotics (or maybe it was an inadequate dose) so what looked like healthy healing turned into a subcutaneous infection just as it was all look well which needed managing and cause me a bit of trouble.

So I’ve been catching up on costume dramas like The Gilded Age about the 1880s boom times in America. I’m on the third season of it and while not quite done but I’m enjoying it.

It’s provided me inspiration before as I’m fascinated that corporate charters are what lead to America’s experiment in self governance and each new era of technological and commercial development seems to kick off new organizational opinion of how best to manage society.

No matter the era or the people involved, humans will always find new ways to organize themselves into hierarchies that reflect changes in technology and material conditions.

As eager as we may be to unravel past cultural ways of organizing our status and importance, we always find new ways to set new standards of who matters and why and the same human nature finds a way to creep back in.

Position, birthright, inheritances and other ways of marking nobility and aristocracy manage to find a way to accommodate wealth and power lest they lose all status.

And who has wealth and power in this century whipsaws so fast, it feels like change is as seasonal as the weather. Even if in reality, society changed little if at all. Money and birth still matter quite a bit no matter how many followers someone has on the latest attention gathering platform.

I’ve mentioned my fondness for Paul Faussell’s Class: A Guided Tour Through The American Status System as a good jumping off point for understanding how American has organized its flavors of granting social capital within our supposedly classless society.

The Gilded Age attempts across the seasons to show that our society is always changing with subplots about rising in society through invention, intellect, political organization and sheer force of will.

Gilded Age’s director Julian Fellows also directed Downton Abbey which famously showed a British aristocratic family struggling with money, social change and war.

Both shows may show ways of changing one’s position in society but the skeptics exist at every turn. Even Fussell has Class X in his guide who exit rather than participate in what he calls the charade of meritocracy.

Fussell argues that it is essentially impossible to change one’s social class —up or down — but it is possible to extricate oneself from the class system by existing outside the system as a X person. Wikipedia

I find this particularly funny as we have entire institutions dedicated to deciding how we see and experience class and their luminaries hate how society organizes itself as much as anyone. The New York Times’s infamous columnist David Brooks finds Fussell’s book a “caustic and extravagantly snobby tour through the class markers of its time” which strikes me as especially funny as he once dedicated a column to worrying if he’d put his assistant into an awkward spot by presuming she wouldn’t know how to order in “gourmet” Italian deli.

Bourgeois bohemian that Brooks was, it never occurred to him that an Italian deli might actually be a lower class marker for plenty of people. American Society being filled with semiotic markers in America to ever really manage a static set of signifiers for all that long.

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 1750 and The Protestant Work Ethic and Masculine Beauty

I am booting up the more practical aspects of writing to provide value, as opposed to the writing I do here, which is to provide a thinking space for myself, and if I’m lucky occasionally my notes will help someone else.

Setting out to provide utility to others is a much higher bar as I’d want the content to meet my own expectations for value. I don’t have necessarily have expectations for utility here even if it provides it more than I’d expect.

I am enjoying preparing posts with research, and the next post teaches a little about the Protestant Reformation and The Enlightenment’s role in the great “Male Renunciation” of appearance.

Afew short centuries upended thousands of years of cultural norms that showcased the importance of masculine beauty and taste and replaced it with a drab mind first Cartesian split.

If I’m going to put together historical context, I figure it has to help the reader feel freed enough to experiment with their own world and consider that they can regain lost or hidden knowledge that was once foundational. In this case how masculinity communicated power, status and taste through appearance.

If you are aspiring to better yourself, to pursue an aristocracy of the soul, we will start with mastering the basic ingredients you will encounter in a drugstore and how they might build into reclaiming your appearance. We will go from there to Pareto-optimal options for building a habit that helps age well and look its best.

So I am having a bit of fun thinking about appearances. Anything anyone of us can do to free up another human to choose a life that is better for them is worth the time.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1737 and The Life You Save Might Be Your Own

I don’t know if high schools still teach Flannery O’Connor. I’m not entirely clear if we even teach American literature to college students anymore if I’m honest.

Reading literature for enjoyment seems to have been reduced to mostly pornography, but I suppose that’s what they said about D. H. Lawrence a hundred years ago so maybe I shouldn’t judge.

Why else would we read fiction if not for the vitality? And what goes from fiction to literature is a reflection of its time.

What it means to be alive, and experiencing the consequences of one’s actions, can feel pornographic if the subject is genuinely exposed. I’m not so sure the explicit and the erotic are any worse a subject than the base and the broken.

That is my awkward segue into the stroke of good luck which introduced me to French existentialism and Southern Gothic literature in the same year as a teenager.

Reading Albert Camus and Flannery O’Connor roughly contemporaneously stood me in relatively good stead throughout the years as to assessing how little we deserve grace in this truly absurd world. Great horrors in a Christian world are hard tests of faith.

As an aside, it’s funny how we ask about her racism and but I doubt an American would have a nuanced view of pied-noir authors in the French pantheon, but I’m not here to decolonize anyone. Have a hazelnut.

Human frailty is my point, and we justify a lot under that sad reality, even as it’s simply true we are all committing a litany of sin by existing.

Literature explores the quiet horrors that we are damaged people in a broken world. That is why we read literature in the first place.

If not for our search for our humanity, we may as well be consuming information via a machine synopsis of a bloated airport book. Thank goodness information pornography is rapidly becoming ever more déclassé than reading romantasy. Malcolm Gladwell may struggle with that one.

I think it’s fine to explore the vitality of human choice and our pragmatic darkness in the safety of fiction. Reality is often much darker. We could all stand to live our lives a little more, even if we are afraid of the shadows our actions cast.

And as part of that effort the first thing I’d drop is spending time on reading book length business explainers. Replace it with short fiction and the life you save may be your own.

Categories
Media

Day 1701 and USS Enterprise (NCC 1701-D)

I have mentioned I’m a fan of Star Trek a few times. I am a genuine fan of the original series, the Next Generation and Deep Space 9 as well as many of the movies.

Gene Roddenberry pitched it as space cowboys but it’s become a template for entire generations for what competence in the face of the unknown should look like.

I’ll happily take either side in the Captain Picard versus Captain Kirk debates, because just as that fashion editor in Devil Wears Prada said about two superficially similar belts, “it’s hard as they are just so different!”

We are facing quite a bit of the unknown right now. Old hierarchies and expectations have changed. Or at least been revealed for what they are. We must ask what we owe each other and how we should expect ourselves to commit to a common cause.

I find myself considering the incredible competence both personally and professionally of the crews. I named this post NCC-1701-D for Picard’s Enterprise as that crew is famously a collaborative and high trust crew. Each one well developed with expertises professionally but also everyone was always trying new things and exploring new skills.

One of my friends accused me of having nerd “stolen valor” as I couldn’t have suffered for my affection for interests like Star Trek. Maybe it’s true girls don’t experience it the same way. Maybe I didn’t notice. I don’t think I cared. I’ll always be someone who sees 1701 and thinks “that’s the Enterprise!”

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1682 and Hipster European Vacation Activated

If there is one complaint Americans have about Europe (and no this isn’t about air conditioning) it is their insistence on playing the worst kind of nightclub music absolutely everywhere.

You are getting your morning espresso and it’s trashy club music. You go eat at a normal neighborhood spot for a quiet dinner and you can feel the beat drop as they place your first course. Domenico Modugno isn’t on any Italian menus these days.

If you are by a hotel pool you better be ready to enjoy some Kylie Minogue nostalgia-core. Which I actually enjoy but I’ve been honest about maintaining my own nostalgia for Hotel Costes delivered by noise canceling headphones. It’s trashy but so is blasting up-temp remixes when I stare at the sea.

The more tourism because contentious in Europe, the worse the problem seems to get. It’s the belief of most proprietors that more local guests and tourists alike prefer this kind of cacophony. When you ask them about turning things down or towing on a playlist better suited to cuisine it can be hit or miss.

Especially if you are the sort to seek out the foodie destinations of a town. Nothing is quite the let down of eating a Michelin quality meal with a backing track of bad house music.

I am sure some tourists have furthered these stereotypes (I’m looking at you Britain). But assure you, Americans do not prefer this especially if your tourism is made up of the first wave of cultural hipster.

Once you go high margin (again apologies to the Europoor tourist) you do bave a very different customer base and they hate this shit We can tolerate your aversion to ice but not an aura assault.

If you have cultural touchstones in your own musical history, we’d much prefer that over dinner.

Authenticity is all anyone will have left in any smoothed over algorithmically perfected middle ground. And guess what it’s not Swedish House Mafia and no one wants Miami or Ibiza to be everywhere. Tallinn and Tirana have their own vibe.

Categories
Culture

Day 1678 and Fiat Prestige and the Inflationary Pressures of Credentialism

America has been rejecting practical workforce training like apprenticeships for over a century. Our military nudged the enlisted into skills but it was access to university education that helped Americans climb the social ladder.

The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 or as you probably know, the “the GI Bill” was so successful that by 1947, WWII veterans accounted for 50% of college enrollments.

Social mobility matters a lot to the mythos of America so it doesn’t surprise me that practical skills were not nearly so attractive once we made prestigious colleges more accessible.

When millennials were children the 1992 Higher Education Reauthorization Act (HEA92) made college loans available to all families, regardless of financial need.

And the trend in spending on education and the cost if higher education has been up and to the right ever since. Over the 59-year period from 1963 to 2022, college tuition increased nearly 300% when adjusted for inflation.

Educationdata.org

The effects of the cultural experiment in social mobility some call The Sort where children with good test scores were shuffled into universities and into the managerial class is driving spend and anxiety.

From Max Weber’s Bureaucratic Society of group status competition to Randy Collin’s work in the 70s on the rise of credentialism in the workplace, it seems as if modern industry drove a deep mimetic desire for prestigious university educations to stay ahead socially.

Having skills was not as important as being seen as having the right credentials. The old joke that Harvard launders the rich kids with the smart kids so no one knows who is who doesn’t seem so funny snore.

Last week a picture went viral of a table of Harvard and Stanford graduates in Silicon Valley (mostly Asian students) was all angst as their credentials mean something to them but not necessarily to employers or founders. So what is the point?

The data shows college education spending consistently outpaces inflation. But is it doomed to keep going up and up even if we are getting less from it? Walter Kirn had a turn of phrase in a tweet today I found apt. We have a problem with fiat prestige in America.

Power flows in the country — human, social & intellectual power flows — look bad for the legacy brokerages & gate keepers. Their services are of declining value, their cartel-like arrangements are dissolving & their ability to maintain their own mystique through circular credentialing & prize-giving — the issuance of what one might call “fiat prestige” — is failing. It’s unclear to me what moves they have left

Inflated currency destroys value. Our Federal Reserve worries about being over a 2% inflation rate and yet we let it happen. So why aren’t we more concerned with fiat prestige and its credentialist inflationary pressures? Our system of social credibility is under significant pressure and if I were Harvard I’d be terrified of going fully Zimbabwe on my social capital.

Categories
Politics

Day 1662 and Class Consciousness Across The Atlantic

America is grossly class segregated in a way that I don’t think Europeans fully grasp but all Americans intuit even if they don’t understand all of its rules. Every time I find myself in Europe I learn something new about socialism and its trade offs.

Sure we talk a big game about the middle class but America has an enormous variance between our poorest classes and our richest. We are a country where capital decides your fate much more so than your birth station. And we have always had mad scrambles to the top between eras of consolidation and state intervention.

American aristocracy has been land owners but as of the post war years it’s been mostly making good financial decisions. Sure land ownership has been one of paths to better class positions but 2008 showed it is a policy choice from the state as much as an economic one.

Even in a middle tier city like the Seattle area you could once see wealth that ranged from Jeff Bezos to port and manufacturing line union workers. Maybe you don’t end up the richest man in the world but if you got a decent job at one of the many companies powering the metropolitan area from Boeing to the port authority you had a nice upwardly mobile life if you took the opportunities available to you.

If you made bad decisions maybe you ended up pretty far out of the city and can’t find steady work but you could find work if you could get to it.

Being poor when you have freedom of movement seems insane to Europeans who understand the logic of borders and state benefits in ways Americans and their interstate mobility don’t always.

You can with unitive move to better jobs and pick up marketable skills and send your children to decent schools. Maybe then they move from the factory line to engineering. In the next generation their kids go from engineering to founding their own company. Ever so the upward logic of American wealth goes. Naturally it’s not that simple but it’s a good story of competitive logic.

If you lived in a booming region maybe you moved to be closer to a core city. If you can move to opportunities you do so.

The question becomes if Americans can move to successful areas why don’t we do so? Some Europeans don’t understand attachment to place as their movements are either inside the Eurozone or a battle to get inside the Eurozone. That we might be attached to our mountain town and not want to move to Denver or Seattle might be a surprise. It’s all one country right?

Western Europe has had a safety net for so long that wealth is more of a choice than poverty. You have to make quite a bit of effort to get around the slow planned socialist efforts of older industrial concerns to become wealthy. But if you can become part of the social fabric you won’t starve or struggle to get antibiotics prescribed either.

If you are in society in Europe you can make through without a healthcare crisis, cut hours or an eviction notice upending your life. That is why there is a fight to be in the social contract of Europe. America has that fight too it’s just less intense as our benefits are about having our passport and are less about having social security. No one believes they will get it anyway.

Eastern and Southern European societies still know closed borders and poverty through restriction of opportunity. Intra-European strife is all about immigration just as immigration from the rest of the world now drives American fears. Who is part of the social contract and why?

Sure you see wealth in Europe but it can feel as if it’s either generational or corruption or both. In America you see how wealth might be both but you get to see how wealth can be series of good decisions.

If you can keep your shit together you can rise. So why don’t we all do it? It’s a mystery to everyone and no one. You either race to coordinate with capital or you opt out of it entirely.

That’s our class system in America and I think it has shown a lot of merit even as some of Europe doesn’t understand why we choose it. Why opt for competition when you can have coordination? Well maybe a New Yorker doesn’t want to coordinate with someone in Texas. We allow for some of that even as the federal tensions rise amongst our compact. Italy upsets Denmark too.

I don’t know how this class compact works itself out on either continent but I always find myself reaffirming my commitment to capitalism anytime I spend even a couple weeks in socialist countries.

Categories
Community Culture

Day 1641 and Honor

The good vibes of my weekend have washed out on the tides as I consider a frustrating non-interaction that has grown into anger in my heart as rapidly as a wheatgrass seed grows in an Easter basket.

I am considering the question of honor in the context of closed communities and events. If you go looking, the cat is out of the bag on where I was and with whom, but I don’t yet have personal permission to use a name, so I’ll keep this brief.

I’m in my Worf era

I’ve been called many names in my time and plenty of them have not been laudatory. Dirty shiksa, stupid cunt, and mostly recently, demonic. Everyone being entitled to their opinion, I don’t generally ask for apologies. I do ask that you say it to my face though.

I am a shiksa, certainly “see you next Tuesday” from time to time, but I remain skeptical that I am possessed by anything from Hades or other Lovecraftian horror from the beyond.

But so long as you use my name in the process of insulting my honor, I only request you look me in the eyes while you do it. I can take it. I stand by who I am and what I say.

So I can’t shake the feeling that I was deliberately dishonored by the speaker. And I am actually angry now. I am used to the insult throwing and name calling of Internet living, indeed I thrive in it. I am not accustomed to aspersions by celebrities as I don’t matter all that much. And I certainly didn’t expect it in a small private group.

I fight in that arena under my own banner. I take those punches under my own name. I won’t lie, someone of stature being so upset as to call me evil without felt good at first (how nice to be noticed) and slowly curdled into a fury over the disrespect.

Maybe it’s because I was one of the few women speaking. It was only after much effort he agreed to speak with my male co-speaker and not me (I’d already left). Maybe it was because after multiple attempts at engagement I was refused time and again. Maybe it’s because his gaze remained staunchly averted. Whatever triggered it has now turned to fiery anger.

I think it’s a bitch move to drop bombs and then runaway like a kicked cur when the beast stirs. And I am quite wide awake now.

I’m the alien in this scenario
Categories
Internet Culture Media Startups

Day 1628 and Attention Whoring

Attention is a currency with an exchange rate so volatile even a hardened ForEx trader would find it exhausting.

There is a new set of younger founders who are taking the attention trade to new heights. Rate baiting marketing is to the 2020s what growth hacking was to the 2010s. Now a startup like Cluely could be the new the new Dollar Shave Club with its viral success. Or could go the way of Clinkle.

Because who cares how you widen the top of your funnel as long as you are getting enough such that down in the trenches of conversion you have enough leads.

Surviving as a startup isn’t easy and you should grab the opportunities you are given. Yet I imagine you end up with the Glen Gary Glen Ross “the leads are weak” kind of situation, but does management care? Probably not.

And so we continue to coarsen our shared business environment but who cares right? Always be closing.

A lot of people do care though. I care quite a bit. Because it is a trade you are making. Something may work but are you sure you can live with the trade? I am with my anon friend here.

attention whoring founders with mediocre goals actually do drive us deeper into cultural nihilism. technology is powerful, and the preservation of healthy culture among technologists is critical for civilization.

opportunity cost is real. the more skilled you are the more it matters. metrics do not matter. what happens to people, to the world, matters. everyone is responsible for upholding standards. every VC hungry for a multiple, every pair of captive eyes, everyone slightly more willing to run toward defecting plays while chasing fool’s gold- Bayeslord

I’ll never begrudge a market. I believe we should have more markets. Go ahead and make concrete your implicit assumptions about the world and humanity. Own it. Show the revealed preference.

But it’s worth knowing how we do that price discovery on these attention trades. In this world we have grounding validity for all kinds of disappointing facts. The world is made up of many noble lies. We all decide how we want to make our trade with reality.

And as to attention whores? Well, the oldest profession surely knows a lot about the soul of man. I’m sure we all share a desire for a greater spirit of man and aspire towards something greater. But sex sells.