I can’t get into the details but I learned today that there is an internal metric at an institution based around work I was personally responsible for achieving.
Literally none of the credit has accrued to me because ultimately the thing didn’t really work but the downstream effects of the social credibility I brought really benefit someone I am not sure I’d have wanted to benefit. If I’d had a choice which I very much didn’t. Sometimes your social capital accrues to people you don’t even like.
I like having social capital to spare but I didn’t realize that someone was profiting off of it to such an intense degree till today. Power laws rule everything around me and it’s actually good. Just funny how little credit you month get for something and how much it might benefit someone else.
I don’t even know if I can even politely point it out simply because it’s déclassé to do so. I’ll have to enjoy the the little irony on my own. And believe me I am. Maybe it gets shared in a small circle of folks for whom making money for jerks it’s a fact of life. But I’ll take the credit privately.
Youth always underestimates the importance of decorum. Holding yourself to the social standards of existing cultural expectations may feel like a bore or even hypocrisy. Worse you may feel helpless if you are from outside a culture and don’t know its rules. But have faith that you can learn other people’s ways and remain yourself
Fish out of water stories are universally popular. I’d urge you to read the TV tropes wiki on the topic as you are likely to recognize dozens of the variations. City mouse, country mouse, Freaky Friday, rags to riches, riches to rags, trapped in another world, and trapped in another time are just the start.
So why do we chafe so much at learning the rules of a situation and treating people the way they wish to be treated? Setting personal standards for behaviors is a strong basis for trust. Demonstrating respect and consideration for others may sound like mere social etiquette but civilization rests on top of it.
Now you may shout “come see the violence inherent in the system” and I’ll happily grant you that much blood has been spilled to build this endeavor we call civilization. I am intensely grateful to have ended up in this age where we have so much capacity for abundance. I’d like to keep it that way.
We have tools for you to learn about the social rules and the games we play as humans. You can just ask an artificial intelligence search engine now to help you learn the rules. It’s such a terrific advantage and I’d urge you to use it as my younger self had to learn many social learns through brutal trial and error. And hey if you still aren’t sure just slide into my DMs. I have some cheat codes I can share.
Twitter had a significant exodus of left wing and moderates as Elon Musk took over the platform. The ugly parts of the internet were allowed free rein on the platform and plenty of users didn’t have time for that.
If you had been raised on a tidy internet of moderation this was upsetting and you went back to moderate places. If you’d been raised on the feral internet you don’t really mind. I was raised on the feral internet. I’m twenty years into sharing space with lunatics.
Some people think the feral internet is is entirely male. And don’t get me wrong, user statistics show 4chan, Reddit, Discord and Twitter are mostly men. But there have always been feminine corners of the internet. And they are influential. Tumblr girls, MySpace, and Livejournal had plenty of the dark feminine before we cleaned things up the consumable Instagram age. Before Ballerina Farm we had much rawer Mormon mommy blogging from Utah. Remember Dooce?
Working in fashion beginning in aughts and teens, I had a front row seat to the dark era of Tumblr. I’d seen horrors arise from femcel message boards. Pro-Ana content was left to fester because no one cared when women kept the harms to themselves. Guess what, those girls aren’t all grown up and now they harm the boys too.
Women are not the good guys on the internet any more than men are the bad guys. The dark places online are dark for everyone. Welcome to the equality we’ve fostered. Scammers and grifters for all.
Dopamine rushes and control fantasies run rampant among the fearful and no flavor of childhood trauma goes unanswered thanks to the persistent financialization of every human relationship. We call this a low trust society.
So you might think it unfair of me to request, as a woman, that the men do not scare the hoes as we travel the next 100 days to the American election.
A right thinking person might recognize that there is no advantage to be gained in the gender wars. We are all combatants in a conflict that serves none of us and does much to degrade us all.
The normies, who let’s be honest are mostly women, are scared shitless of the aggressive edge of online discourse. They don’t like any of this shit.
And I don’t think you will like what happens and who ends up in charge of we’ve got a terrified population. So knock it off. Be a man. That’s a gender neutral statement. Our civilization is for adults.
That is actually a pretty conservative viewpoint to have. What if you can’t upend all the systems around you even if you’d like to apply something demonstrably better. Technology isn’t just gadgets. There are social technologies too. Media and money are both in that category. And it’s taken time to integrate both.
How we perceive each other and what we are owed relies a lot on both “what we’ve always done.” I think investors actually have reasonably good intuition that most “insane invention that breaks with all we’ve ever known” happens in spite of human nature and not because of it.
I am absolutely fascinated by how others read history in light of this fact. We highlight revolutions and change but as any good “nothing ever happens” nerd will tell you it takes forever.
So if you think something is going to change for good you need to make the case consistently over time. And one thing that just doesn’t change that fast is who is in charge.. Haves and have nots. The people who make the rules and the people who follow them. How you became a member of the class of people who make those decisions versus the class of person who accepts their decision is basically the TLDR of civilization. Classism appears to be incredibly hard to shake and we reorganize regularly to praise our betters.
America likes to tell itself a lot of stories about our rebellion against monarchy but it’s mostly a story about who gets to keep the wealth. Answering to your betters is enforced eventually with the pointy end of the stick and you can decide then how much you have to lose. If it’s enough (or very little) that’s when you get in trouble.
America being a break with British mercantilism has a pretty happy end of colonialism story. That isn’t true everywhere. Plenty of place kept their ruling classes with plenty of social benefits. Bread and circus is now healthcare and collegiate education. This expansion of prosperity has not gone evenly for everyone.
Welcoming in the everyone is one of America’s most cherished narratives but we we have done a lot to cherry pick other country’s the best and brightest who are otherwise stymied in political and social systems who don’t recognize them.
So when the markets crater I think it tells you something about how we all feel everyone else must feel. Some interests don’t feel good about Kamala Harris. Technology stocks cratered. Lockheed Martin on the other hand was up in the markets today.
Maybe that tells you something about who is and isn’t more established in the hierarchies of America. Maybe that should influence your actions. QQQ is not brat but the Styles section is very happy. Shondaland might have gotten the “we’d get rid of race but never class” thing right on Bridgerton after all. Anyways now is a great time to read your Thucydides.
Kayfabe is the art of being a real fake in professional wrestling. You are cast in a role and it is maintained for the audience. Many fans would agree that the most role is the heel.
“The role of a heel is to get ‘heat,’ which means spurring the crowd to obstreperous hatred, and generally involves cheating and any other manner of socially unacceptable behavior.”
When we can no longer agree on a hero, it is the heel who moves opinions. A personal mythos is more easily punctured than Kayfabe in the internet age of total recall. You step out of your assigned role and the hero’s journey is revealed to be a fraud. But a heel is always breaking rules.
We are in a well heeled age. Everywhere you turn is an antagonist. Cheering and jeering, we the audience long to see our heat applied. The heel relishes it and we relish their antagonism.
Would you rather be loved or feared? Machiavellians can debate but the audience loves a heel because they fear a world where no rules can ever be broken. His freedom represents their own.
The original culture and the commodification of the culture is a spectrum and the Tommy Hilfiger Event Horizon is infinite. Who makes culture, who money and who only brings money can be challenging to calculate.
The validation of something “cool” eventually reaches a point of opportunistic acceptance by those merely into a thing for the capital. Sometimes it’s social and sometimes literal currency.
These so called “sociopaths” who follow the momentum often do not realize that they are just in it to capitalize on cool. I don’t want to suggest anyone in a thing for money or cachet is a sociopath just that incentives for status are significant drivers for people.
Often we need the people in it for the money. It’s wonderful that angel investing exists and momentum investors have perfectly rational incentives. Sometimes you will even see significant self awareness about this. If you put resources into a community and don’t cause trouble you are often welcome.
Now you can refer to this type in startup investing as dumb money. The follow-on capital that is riding on the work of others who authentically believed before a thing was cool is a necessary part of the ecosystem.
I don’t at all mind when someone is a follower. You can be “a cringe follower late adopter” or whatever terminology we are now using to describe laggards in the adoption curve.
Unless you are a pain in the ass, actively predatory, or making your contribution more trouble than it’s worth, you should go ahead and lend your support if you can take the risk.
Don’t take it personally when hipsters sneer. They may have been earlier than you but it’s fine to back winners. Just don’t expect the founders to give you special dispensation for getting on board when it was safe to do so. It’s right that the alpha premium applies. I personally love it when not only am I right but I got paid more for the privilege.
I miss living in a world where nothing happens. I suspect well-off Americans took for granted the artificial smoothing of conflicts & markets that our global dominance granted. That era seems to be over. And blame must be apportioned.
Like many people, I watched the presidential debate last night between former President Trump and President Joe Biden. I had low expectations. It would seem they weren’t low enough.
You expect the lies from politicians. You expect spin from media commentators.
But nothing prepared me for the scapegoating of an old man clearly struggling. The entire chattering class, sensing weakness in Biden, seems to have decided to turn en mass.
A screenshot of headlines declaring Biden’s performance was a disaster.
Americans have many sins, not the least of which is tolerating a political establishment that is unable or unwilling to be held accountable.
Making a sacrifice of Biden when the hour is so late has the flavor of a desperate prayer. Placing those failures onto one symbol is powerful. Biden being subject to the ancient ritual in Leviticus was perhaps inevitable. The poor old goat deserved better than being made to carry the iniquities of us all.
There was a Baz Luhrmann song “Everybody’s Free” that became popular at graduations for millennials. It was delivered as advice for the class of 99 and became a cheesy but heartfelt touchstone for many millennials celebrations.
It is a tearjerker and contains some useful insights on nostalgia and advice.
Be careful whose advice you buy but be patient with those who supply it Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past From the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts And recycling it for more than it’s worth
I had sunscreen on my mind when consider its wisdom, I was trying on a new SPF tinted moisturizer as I dragged through my morning routine tired from 3 weeks of Covid. I tweeted a one off idle thought about the nostalgic advice I’d been given about how to live my life.
It’s amusing to me that two of the biggest cultural trends for women in the 2010s, Marie Kondo’s “spark joy cleaning” and Sheryl Sanders’s “Lean In” got immediately tossed the moment their life circumstances changed.
If there is one thing the internet agrees on it’s that life is always more complicated than 140 characters. Coming to terms with we feel about the advice and cultural stories we were told is a touchy subject online. Even more so when it comes to what women should be doing.
We all have ideas about how we should be living that come up hard against the realities. It’s a comfort to think anyone has living figured out. So much has changed and at such a rapid pace that we are looking for new scripts. It can be kind when someone offers you a solution. Let us take what lessons we can from the past as we seek the future.
Many years ago I maintained a spreadsheet of my wardrobe so I could calculate out my “cost per wear” because I am that sort of nerd.
Fast fashion was coming into its own in that era but I did work for retail luxury so with employee discounts and access to sample sales I acquired the occasional $900 Italian leather good. Keep in mind these were late aughts prices.
It comforted me somewhat to see that I got so much use out of those boots (getting the cost per wear into cents) but that the H&M trend item got work a handful of times. I felt a need for my style to work for me which is a design preference many a working aesthete can appreciate. It helped to see what integrated into my life laid bare.
The irony being fashion I got from Zara in 2010 and some of the older collaborations from fast fashion retailers remain better quality than what you could get from an LVMH luxury house now. We’ve had quite a bit of price inflation while any pretense to quality has gone a bit to the wayside.
Much of the work of looking stylish can be defrayed with simply spending more but taste is the sort of thing can be cultivated through experience with limits. Having a budget and an understanding of what you are trying to achieve can be a valuable tool in almost any domain.
Anytime I am outside of the bubble of American media algorithms, I feel like I see more clearly. It’s easier to spot “spin” when you see multiple narratives from competing supranational actors. When I’m in Europe, it’s much easier to see competing angles from Russia, China, and competing industrial interests.
The term “spin doctor” emerged during the Reagan-Mondale debates in the 1984 election.
A spin doctor is a person, typically a political aide or publicist, whose role is to present information or events in a way that favors a particular perspective or interpretation. Their goal is to influence public opinion by putting a favorable “spin” on the narrative.
It combines the meanings of “spin” (a biased interpretation or slant) and “doctor” (someone who repairs or fine-tunes things). Spin doctors aim to control the media’s portrayal of events by providing their own analysis and framing the story in a way that benefits their side.
We are in the golden age of propaganda and every single one of us competes in shifting alliances of attention and affiliation. We are all spin doctors now for our causes.
