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!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Being disagreeable has a lot going for it. It’s frowned on when women do it even though it is usually coded as a feminine trait. Traditionalists say they want agreeable wives and iconoclast lords.
Despite this call to the past, it’s not hard to argue that this amenable feminine and chaotic masculine is itself a bit subversive. Fractious independent goddesses and agreeable brotherhoods are archetypes too.
I am fearful in this moment that we have less patience for disagreements among humanity just as our capacity for loyalty and reciprocity dims with atomization.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease has a bit of a “both sides of the bus” meme quality to it. Attention can build you up and tear you apart.
The eye of American’s elite class has many competing stories about which ideas must be celebrated, which are taboo and which are too dangerous to be discussed. And that’s just the last couple of days of essays at the New Yorker.
I’ve been writing about the increasing entropy in our systems for so long that the actual arrival of the chaotic years always felt like an inevitability that would never come. And yet they are here.
The internet is a hostile place as ideas war and humanity struggles with the weight of a fully networked world. I feel it in my body. I see the automation of attention grabbing even as the birth of the most powerful tools for control over my information environment have never been more readily available.
I persist in being a public human presence on the internet. I know I am part of the web. We built cyberspace out of a world of special interests and varied incentives and it’s giving us back something much larger than our individual contributions. I think the next stage of networking will offer us much more.
Because of that value of that potential I cannot let myself step back from shaping its form. The new world is trained on those of us who put up what we know, think, feel, and desire to be part of the human experience.
It’s not always a pretty picture but I will not cede this space simply because we have the tools to fill an infinity. I do not have an infinity. And I can hold out for a little bit in that time.
The internet loves to have fights over which intellectual, religious, artistic, or political views are discredited by the sins of its people. We have to police all kinds of things lest the youth get the wrong impression.
If you dig into any serious gathering of humans you will be shocked by human nature. You shouldn’t be but Americans have it pretty good so we often are. This despite us living in a Woody Allen panopticon where we cannot separate the man from the work. We are forced to look at others sins constantly.
And it’s upsetting I won’t lie. Way more people than you’d like fall into the pederast camp. I didn’t even know that was a word till I met some Italians. Blessedly free of this knowledge in lived experience. Woody Allen, Michel Foucault (he gave us the panopticon) and Socrates were all committing sins against children. I’d argue you can skip Annie Hall but you shouldn’t skip Plato or Foucault.
Depending on whose authority you crave you the real danger to watch out for is different historical flavors of Marxists and fascists and where they settled.
Plenty of academics and journalists dislike understanding humans for who they were in their time and judging them in context of their output.
That’s dangerous according to more than a few scolds in the media and the academy. Drop the term Straussian and see how it goes over at a dinner party. Dangerous truths ahhh!
There are lots of little shibboleths for discerning which Hegelians took a turn with the Italian futurists. Have you heard of Russian Cosmism?Also dangerous. Don’t even get me started on what it means that JD Vance may or may not be an Ulster Scott and what that does or doesn’t mean to certain sects of reactionaries.
I honestly can’t keep up despite being as relatively close as one can come to being expert weird future fixated movements while not being a historian or a journalist.
Guilt by association in the process of living through history is both a horrifying and sticky business if we look too closely. I have a shelf full of Modernist Marxists which I’m certain wouldn’t have allowed me to survive the Red Scare despite my intense dislike for communism. So beware the Woody Allen panopticon. It comes for everyone. But also leave them kids alone.
I’m not sure exactly how to characterize Doomer Optimism other than a kind of social club for Internet denizens that wish to retain their optimism in the face of chaos and change. It’s a very human group and I’ve enjoyed their company for years.
I’m one of the odder congregants in this group which includes a diverse array of characters from all classes and walks of life. I say I’m the odd man out only because I’ve seen them as a generally regenerative self sufficient localist group that in another era would have been back to the land hippies, unionists, environmentalists and anarchists. Generally left wing coded but skeptical of state and corporate power.
That I’m one of a handful of practicing technologists that participates, and a libertarian, means I argue for the liberatory power of open source software and its range of applications for individuals to enable a life that can provide means and meaning without being in the jaws of the Machine.
Decentralizing technologies lets us all participate. More individuals are interested in thinking how they engage with industrial processes. 3D printing enables many types of freedom and is crucial to the right to repair movement. Which gives power back to the owner of property and not the corporation from which it was purchased. I unabashedly support the freedom to compute as a human who wishes to find a harmony with the machine in all its forms. Be not controlled by your tools or their makers. Make your own future.
If none of this strikes you as particularly right wing, reactionary or otherwise populist, or even statist; I’d agree with you. I am a libertarian.
And yet there are those who are still enthralled by old narratives of political poles that this individual, and choice centered, politics is one grounded in real people with real problems not financial or social abstractions.
Paul is a neighbor, a friend, and a gentleman in the most noble possible sense. He does not traffic in status or social cachet. He is a free thinking and curious American man who is dedicated to hearing a large swathe of perspectives. He wrote a response and included the email screenshot below. I am certain Paul really does mean his hospitality genuinely.
Dear @awinston
Thank you for your email (below). Of course its intent was not in good faith nor was it evidence of genuine curiosity, but it did cause me to reflect on the scope of @thewagonbox project and the growing constellation of characters around it. And I had to think about you, and Mr. Wilson, and how one should respond to the sort of witch hunts for political wrong-think that have become your cottage industry (one that I’m afraid is dying.)
To your first point: an interesting aspect of the Wagon Box, and particularly our Doomer Optimism events, is the breadth of the politics represented. Seneca Scott is a ‘90s democrat who wants a safe community for his family and goats. James Pogue, like me (and Jesus), has anarchist sensibilities, cares about the habitat for the trout he fishes and is leery of the global hegemonic machine. Ashley Fitzgerald is a suburban mom who likes regenerative agriculture and healthy neighborhoods. The event has largely focused on a suspicion of “The Machine” and ways to live humanely and harmoniously with the natural world. The idea that it is some hotbed of “hard/far right” ideology, or that we are promoting “corporate governance” is laughable.
To the question of the “ties” I have to Ryan Payne, or Jonathan Keeperman, or D. C. Miller, or any other person you may see as a “smoking gun” evidence of nefarious ideology, I have a few comments. First of all, you have left out other characters who have graced the Wagon Box, some of whom you might even consider even worse! And of course there are others hard to place politically, like Walter Kirn, Patrick Deneen, Paul Kingsnorth, or Max Foley. All these characters differ quite widely, have deep disagreements, but all have something in common: I find them interesting and care about what they have to say, and they see enough in me to take me up on my invitation.
You ever get to talking to someone and you see their eyes glaze over? They do not care what you have to say, they are not listening. It’s no fun. It is death. What’s the point? Good faith curiosity is the lifeblood of any relationship, of any conversation, of journalism, and of self governance. There are swaths of folks who have had good faith curiosity driven from them, and it has been done largely by people like you, who paint in caricatures and come to stories with an agenda, who live on fear and suspicion. You send a guy like me some sort of hostage note instead of an invitation to a real conversation. It’s sad.
At the root of the Wagon Box project is my personal curiosity in people, and at the root of that is a conviction that we will all be together eventually at a large table in a conversation that will never end. Our enemy is no person, but the stale impulse of death that preys on love, on connection, on community. It thrives in the Machine of mass delusion of which, regrettably, The Guardian is a mouthpiece. It has forced you to have a narrower view of people, a static view, and one that lacks curiosity. But I really do care about you, as you too are on a journey and I’d love to hear about it. Let’s grab coffee and talk sometime. No deadline.
I brought up the context of there being technologists as part of this conversation as another reporter who shares a similarly slanted lens who seems to have quite a problem with Silicon Valley while not really understanding the core values that technologists share that are not compatible with a controlled statist or even corporatist view of power.
We are going through a huge cultural change that will sweep many of us up its cascading consequences. We will have materially different conditions as artificial intelligence changes day to day life.
Do you want to trust those who insist on control to prevent horrors? Or do you want to trust yourself and your fellow man to engage with one another as human? I’ve chosen optimism. I believe we can build freely.
