Tag: Stream of Consciousnesses

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Chronicle

Day 94 and Moods

I got some great news today. All my most recent round of blood work came back in the healthy range. After several years of piss poor inflammatory markers I’m thrilled to see it getting back to normal. But I’m somehow I’m a foul mood for the day.

I talked to a friend about some exciting work we want to do together. It’s exactly the kind of work I’m looking to do in the future and their take on the problem is especially creative. But somehow I’m in a foul mood.

It’s a beautiful Easter Day and I’ve done nothing but enjoyable activities. I went for a hike. Are a gorgeous meal made up of ingredients from our local dairy share and greens from the hydroponics we grew ourselves. But somehow I’m in a foul mood.

I can’t remotely pinpoint why I should feel angry or sad or in anyway negative and yet I’m just a half a step off from the reality of my life today. Not even a viral tweet is doing anything to cheer me. And I usually love dopamine hits. I only had one minor setback in the whole day. I wasn’t looking at a timer and I had a gaming account get zeroed (it will cost a little money to rebuild). Ironically the last time this happened was over Christmas. Apparently holy days and games are a poor mix. But that shouldn’t account for a mood.

I guess some days are just moods. But I’ve got some nachos and tomorrow is another day. I bet I’ll be happy tomorrow.

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Chronicle

Day 92 and Creative Muscle

The more writing has become a daily habit the more I can feel the ebbs and flows of my own voice. Some days I feel a passionate need to share some story or insight, and others, I feel like my voice can barely muster a sentence let alone a full fledged argument.

There are days where fully thought through essays seem to emerge with little effort. As if I wrote them in my subconscious throughout the day and it’s only the slight flick of focus that brings it fully formed to the page. Other days I need to scrape at the contours of my mind to see what fancies or novelties has passed through my attention through the day. Often in theses cases a bit of zeitgeist has stuck in a crevice and I can pull it out and expand on it. I can take a small nugget and chew on it till I find the juice.

I don’t mind the days where I need turn my eye within. The self reflection and additional effort is what I think may slowly be making me a better writer. While I don’t struggle with needing discipline to write everyday, I do need to exercise effort to find ideas that haven’t formed yet. The daily nature of the experiment is building out new thought muscles. It’s making my thinker clearer, faster and crisper. The regular exercise of thought and mind, whether I’m inspired or not, feels as if it’s making inspiration strike more often and my mind see clearly.

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Aesthetics Chronicle Finance Internet Culture

Day 89 and The Real Fake Fendi

What is real? Do originals exist? Can we determine the source of creative genesis when we stew in the folklore of cultural memetics? A knockoff has its own reality steeped in the accretion of culture.

I was once was asked by a tourist for direction’s to find “a real fake Fendi” when I lived in Manhattan’s Chinatown. I was honestly stumped by this inquiry. Was there a fake that had inherent realness that other knockoffs did not possess? Was there a vendor who sold the most authentic mimicry of Fendi which the tourist wished to find? I had no clue how to answer. Did they mean the realness one sees on the catwalks overseen by RuPaul? But which kind of realness? The creation that evokes the spirit of its inspiration? A realness so over the top and yet absolutely true to its essence. Or perhaps the blunt direct feedback that no construction no matter how convincing is the original artifact. Is is serving realness? I honestly didn’t know. I just told them Canal was one block north.

But perhaps authenticity isn’t the issue. In drag authenticity is manufactured. In fashions’ knockoff districts the question of authenticity is a layered confect of replication adhering to the aesthetics of the original. In some cases it actually is the original conveniently lost from some faraway inventory count. The real fake Fendi might in fact be real.

I bring this all up because in Illegal.Auction’s second collection we have curated a selection of the most outrageous instances of authenticity being the commodity sold in the NFT space. None of what we have posted are originals. They are all knockoffs. But like the real fake Fendi how can you tell? What makes something original in digital spaces. All is perfectly replicable. And no we have no new answers from Benjamin’s Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction either. But maybe you will. You can buy a token of these real fake NFTs. Like the real Fake Fendi realness is in the eye of the beholder.

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Aesthetics Chronicle Internet Culture Media

Day 87 and Information Processing

I occasionally enjoy dropping a deliberately provocative tweet just to see where people will land on rorsach wordings. I particularly like ones that can be read depending on your place in cultural issues haven’t reached consensus. which is exactly why people get angry. I did this on a whim yesterday asking “is listening to audiobooks reading?”

About 70% of folks said yes. 30% said no. But the reasons why were fascinating. The majority probably doesn’t care about semantics (the minority do which I will get to) but a good chunk cares about the connotations associated with how we learn or retain information. Mostly as a function of diversity and inclusion as many folks find reading to be inaccessible for reasons of neurodivergence or focus.

I relate as I don’t process audio easily so prefer subtitles and transcripts. Sometimes I feel bad about this as folks occasionally moralize about the value of mediums I don’t find accessible. There are plenty of things that I can’t engage with or experience in its original form because of disability. I’m just not particularly angry about it. But I am also left with all of the high prestige ways of consuming culture and none of the lowbrow. Like bummer I don’t have podcasts but I still have Dostoyevsky

That’s ultimately the interesting point about asking if reading and listening are similar. What do we consider to be higher processing? And does that matter? Some folks definitely moralized on the issue on. It’s sides. If you retain the information who cares how you got it. And accessibility is its own value. Pop culture is arguably more important because of its accessibility. This is why memes are folk art. They produce a very low loss form of high meaning to content ratio

A third of folks wanted about the definition used. A lot of semantics of information consumption. If you fall into the camp of caring about how we discuss information processing there is an amazing book called the Alphabet and the Goddess: The Conflict between Word and Image about the transition from image to binary communication and the changes in our neurological structures by a surgeon called and Leonard Schlain.

Like the actual debate about what types of processing is happening and how it affects our structures is worth having. But so much of Twitter boils down to the moral scolds and the rage woke fighting over ideas of worth and assigning value and status. I’d rather discuss how our minds process and that impacts the trajectory of our civilizations.

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Chronicle

Day 86 and Persistence

I’m learning to live around my routines. Or maybe my routines are what I live and everything else that I perceive as life is just moments in between meals, meditation, supplements, treatments, workouts, walks, and pharmaceuticals. Who is to say what forms the contours of life?

When I first picked up the daily commitment to write I struggled to find a topic to write about each day and I would find myself stressed if the end of the day was nearing and I felt I had nothing of value to say. Now I am realizing that having something to say isn’t the point of this daily discipline. It is the persistence that matters. The content is secondary. The knowledge that every day I will write and so I do is what matters. I will exercise the willpower necessary to form my thoughts into words. I will place them in public to prove to myself that I have remained committed. This is like any other aspect of my routine. Breath in and breathe out. Lift the weight. Take the medicine. Write the words.

Daily disciplines bring about breakthroughs. The individual acts maybe don’t matter so much. Some days will be better than others. But persistent effort brings about quality inexorably. It forces a standard of quality that improves at each repetition in some meaningful way even if you cannot see it in that moment. I find the act of creation easier now. It doesn’t feel like a burden. It is nit a source of stress or anxiety. It’s just something I do.

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Chronicle

Day 80 and Spring Equinox

Seasons seems to have fallen into the same category as “time” in that both have no meaning anymore. The pandemic has loosened our grip on linearity in our perception of time significantly. Which I view as an unabashedly positive thing. Why should we all be forced into living as if life moved in a straight line?

Nature has given the impression of being keen on rhythms like seasonal transitions but the more human life bangs on the planet the less it seems like seasons matter either. I’m less sure if that’s a net benefit like losing a linear sense of time (that was always bullshit) but losing nature’s rhythms is a bit weirder.

It’s the first official day of spring in the northern hemisphere and its snowing in Colorado right now. And we just dug ourselves out of over two feet of snow from a significant blizzard. The only indicator that seasonal change is upon us is day and night reaching equilibrium.

I’m having mixed feelings on the season of rebirth. A kind of shaken manic state has taken hold of our emotions with the possibility that the pandemic could be tamed. With vaccines rolling out quickly giddy conversations about summer reunions and family travel are cropping up. Friends are sounding optimistic about seeing each other again..All while we don’t really know if things will actually be better with a number of unknowns in the ether.

I’m not sure I want to change my lifestyle for a post pandemic world. Much as I’m praying vaccines remain effective and same. The pandemic has revealed many elements of our past lives to be unsustainable. I like being home. I like office life being considered less productive than the freedom to work from where you wish. . And I really like not having to socialize for professional reasons. I hope we keep the best elements. If I felt safe that all the accessibility was going to remain maybe I’d feel ready to celebrate spring. As it is I have some snowy winter worries on what life will look like as we step out of the cold into a new spring.

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Chronicle Internet Culture

Day 77 and Bedtimes

As a dedicated shitposter I have got to learn to keep the takes to myself after 9pm. It’s feels like I’ve been following gossip about the perennial “platform versus editorial” since I was a toddler (in reality maybe since I was in college) so every time a new chapter unfolds I lap it up. Mostly because I’m a sucker for media gossip and this is a personal favorite.

Last night after my bed time I starting reading more Substack hot takes (if you aren’t following people are worked up about a program called Substack Pro and what opinion writers are or are not being paid by the startup) and decided to be a dork and say shit even though I knew I’d regret it. Not the shitposting itself to be clear, I never regret a take, I just regret doing it when I should be asleep. Two hours later I’m way too worked up to sleep. Twitter is a lot of fun and I’m a high energy kind of person. Despite me being dedicated to my healthy routines I ended up not sleeping till midnight and then got woken up at 530am. So I’m a bit of walking nightmare today as I’m really too old for late night goofing off even if it’s just on the internet and not a nightclub (remember those?).

So if you see me goofing off on social media after 9pm please tell me to go to bed. Do not encourage me. Don’t feed the trolls. And by trolls I mean me

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Chronic Disease Chronicle

Day 76 and Lost Time

I didn’t used to keep much of a routine. Startup life and Manhattan nightlife made for a lot of variability in my days. But the trick of losing your body to sickness means that you don’t need the novelty of nightclubs or the emotional highs of startup life.

My body now provides all kinds of surprises all on its own. I can feel terrific one day and the next for no apparent reason I’m practically immobile from pain. The frequency has gone down significantly this year thanks to modern medicine and a lot of biohacking but let’s just say I’m grateful I work on the internet so no one cares if I’m flat on my back typing in bed.

But one things I’ve found to be extremely helpful in managing the foibles of an unreliable body is a deliberate routine. I honestly wish I had learned the value of routine earlier in life. Maybe I’d be healthy now if I had shown the same dedication to supplements, exercise, meditation and sleep. Objectively that’s probably unlikely as some stuff is just chance and generics but man when you find something that works you want to retcon your whole life.

But there is a downside to routine. You cannot get sucked into work manias because you have to stop to meditate or take a supplement or get in a workout. Routines keep you from meandering as you can fill a whole day with good behavior. But life sometimes needs more randomness than a strict day of check lists. Today I felt like an entire disappeared to my routine and while physically I feel well I’m not entirely sure I got anything done despite having taking all my pills on time. I lost time between all the good things I was going to keep stable. Sometimes I worry that all this effort will keep me from the creativity and serendipity of a life lived without good habits. But then I might end up sick and back in bed so I hope it’s a fair trade. But I still worry I’d rather lose time to work binges or nights out.

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Chronicle Internet Culture

Day 67 and Virality

There are few more satisfying feelings in the world than seeing your emotions mirrored back to you. It’s what makes us fall in love, form communities, build anything that takes the work of more than one person. I’m not sure that anything matters more to humans than feeling seen.

Feeling seen is valuable. Finance knows it, marketers know it, fashion designers know it and the algorithms really know it. A switch flips when the outside world mirrors us back. The cold reality of being atomistic individuals dissolves just a little with the prospect that the other might not be so far away after all

This is why going viral on social media is such an ecstatic feeling for people. Being mirrored at mass scale is beyond pleasure and pain. Virality is existential. This fact is not lost on Silicon Valley and various expatriates of the culture and even current citizens question the morality. Creating virtual existential experiences feels wrong to us. And I can’t argue that the consequences of virality hasn’t done significant damage to the fabric of civilization. Facebook has more blood on its hands than a small government. But I’m not sold that synthetic experiences are morally worth less than natural ones. Social media replicates religious and cultural experiences but whether it’s “worse” than the other existential experiences is a bit like questioning if opium or fentanyl is worse because plants are morally superior to chemistry labs. The effect is the same more or less. Sure the dosing is what gets you but arguing scale gets you into a “good of the many or good of the one” debates and I’m not the crew of the Enterprise or Spock.

I can tell you that it’s probably best to be cautious about anything that can get you hooked if you know you are an addict. I’ve gone viral on Twitter several times in the past week and probably going on double digits now in the last year. Each time I get a new appreciation for how much it can feel like a god has messed with your reality. If it goes poorly you feel like you got hit by a bolt from the blue. Even if it goes well you worry if maybe Aries has decided to make you his tool. I’m a Christian so I’m no stranger to the feeling of surrender to a higher power, but watching a machine algorithm play like the left hand of God in your life is fucking weird.

By Silicon Valley standards I’m a minor clerical authority in some backwater. I’ve been initiated into the rights but I’m not close to the Vatican or Mecca. Being swept up in the miracle of virality makes some amount of sense to me and I appreciate the benefits of status that it confers. But I know it’s a ritualized way of bringing us closer to the divine that’s not about the individual and is ultimately about the institution. Fortunately I’m also a Calvinist so I have very few illusions about my place in the experience. I’m still a sinner and whether I’m damned or not hasn’t got much to do with human rituals. But I’m not immune to the awesome either.

So if you are inclined to use social media be careful what weight you assign to your actions and words. At any moment a miracle facilitated by the rites of machines can and will occur. I made a stupid joke about a monarchy in decline and a television show about a witch in a massive universe of superheroes. But 31,000 accounts decided to like it and a million discrete instances of it were produced to “others” willing to mirror it back to me. Which is about as stupid a thing as I can imagine happening and also as close to the random miraculously nature of God as I can possibly imagine. Just don’t read too much into it or your faith might have an existential crisis as well.

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Chronicle Finance Internet Culture

Day 57 and The Fungible

Finance commodifies. The value of one thing must be stacked against the value of another. We can put “a thing” in a ledger and trade it for another thing.

Making something that is not a commodity into a piece of property that can be valued, traded, sold, or transferred is the natural order of financialization.

Not content with turning food or labor into commodities, we have created financial products to divine literally anything into an asset that can be owned, traded, or hedged against.

We’ve decided on fancy vocabulary words like fungible to make the basics of human reality seem more exciting. Or maybe just to charge more for it. 2 and 20 requires a bit of song and dance I suppose.

Fungible is a funny word too. Interchangeable makes more sense. It has more inherent meaning when brought to the context of finance. Sure, we bristle at the idea that our labor, our time, our creations are interchangeable, but we assign values to them so human creations largely have value that are easily exchanged. Finance commodifies. Just because you are unique doesn’t mean your creations aren’t things.

This week we sell non-fungible tokens (nft’s). A financial person might stop and think “ok, but I prefer the fungible, as I myself trade interchangeable things”. And this isn’t, it’s right there in the name. And if I’m not, I damn well better be doing it with something that has a price we agree on like a dollar or an ounce of gold.

And yet here we are with the NFT. Art lands in this category. It is unique. It is non-fungible (say that at a party and see how fast people walk away). It is unique it and cannot be made interchangeable. And yet we sell set.

So how do we trade it? How do we assign value? This contradiction tickles the minds of thoses who have aggregated many interchangeable items with agreed upon values. The rich I mean. The rich enjoy the tension inherent in a thing not being a fully agreed upon commodity. A “not thing” can be worth more than a “thing” precisely because we don’t agree on it. Even if the process of assigning something a price can often feel like it is toeing the semiotic line of “not a thing” assigning value brings it into “thing-ness” by anchoring its reality to the present.

Signifiers are required. The semiotics of value. The desired exchange. And so we toss technical terminology on top like fungible and pretend these frameworks make it easier to turn a “not thing” into a “a thing”

The non-fungible token. It is right there in the name. It is not interchangeable. And yet it has an assigned value. It has been funged.

Standardization, interoperability. Tradeability, liquidity, immutability, scarcity. Amazing what finance can do to a “not thing” in no time at all.