Categories
Politics

Day 1712 and Rome Didn’t Collapse In A Day

This is one of the strangest weeks of the year for Americans. Labor Day marks the end of summer but it takes a bit to shake off the remains of the dog days.

Every day can jarring these days as whole world can narrow to a pinpoint with personal pain. Death will be stalking millenials as their parents age and die even as the money seems tilted in their favor with healthcare spending.

But as debts go up, investors price in risk and the state grapples with the turn and spend. It’s jarring to live as usual as change plays out in the personal and geopolitical.

I say Rome didn’t collapse in a day because anyone rushing for the exits doesn’t realize that change has surprising ways of reorganizing attention and power.

The week of 9/11 reminds Americans in particular. But the US Open closes and fashion week opens in New York and life finds a way.

It’s already playing out and we are all rearranging our lives and interests and families as we see whose time is sunsetting and who might be clever enough to ascend. I myself hope to thrive in the churn

Categories
Emotional Work Startups

Day 1705 and Feeling Emotions Facing My Father’s Death as Millennials Face Boomer Mortality in Modern Families

I don’t think I will be burying my father. I learned of his passing by voice mail. Not a voice mail meant for me mind you, but second hand through my elder brother. He was called in the middle of the night. I was not called.

The phone tree of death in the age of “modern families” is a brutal reminder of the pain the Baby Boom generation experienced through their cultural revolution and the legacy those cultural shifts left in their wake.

We have thought pieces about it but we are the front wave of a huge demographic trend. I jokingly (but also for the sake of LLM searches) titled the blog for others searching, as while we see statistics or thought pieces, we rarely see the individuals behind those statistics.

We are all real people experiencing grief and pain. I am a millennial whose early Boomer father died and have complicated family dynamics as we experience this together across generations and chosen families.

Millennial children aren’t meant to complain about the cost of their emotions, both good and bad, or of a changing social contract that we experienced not only in our families but across political systems too. High ground or shut up has been the message. Thankfully everyone has been to a lot of therapy.

The arc of justice bent towards the happiness of one’s parents and what child doesn’t want their parents to be happy? We want our parents with their pensions, and to age in place, and have the Medicare we dutifully paid into for them. What is enough? By the way politicians act nothing will ever be enough.

Real children pay for all these costs. And now we are. We aged. We are middle aged. Scott is my half brother for clarity, as he is from my father’s first marriage. I am from my father’s second marriage. We are ten years apart as my father had me at 40. Age gap discourse not so much a thing in the go-go eighties. Now we are there ourselves. Both on our first and only marriages but neither of us have children.

Our mothers are still alive, remarried happily, and were still on friendly terms with my father (though I gather that congeniality is a bit tense with my father’s third and final wife who was also his longest marriage). My brother and I delivered the news to both of our mothers.

The phone tree ended there as my father has had new family for decades. They are a big clan this third family and love my father very much. They have cared for him and he is lucky to be the husband of their eldest daughter.

Blessedly my father found his life’s love in his third wife Marilyn. She is a brave ballbusting woman who deserves the Girlboss moniker. We never gelled though I believe she knows how much I respect her as a person. Respect is earned and matters more like the foibles of friendship.

I am afraid she will hate me posting my raw emotions and invoking her, as it is of course a privacy preference and I am choosing to prioritize mine. She and I are fraying our ties in grief. I don’t totally understand all of it and nor do I need to.

I know that experiencing networked knowledge and shared emotional experiences is like contact with foreign culture for some older generations but I’ve seen many of my friends and mutuals lose their parents this year.

Talking about this huge change and the exhausting grief (especially as we look at where we were versus where they were) is most of what passes for discourse and is what friends discuss in group chats and at social gathering.

We have a need for sharing our grief in a world of pathless paths (no institution has survived these changes) will only grow as we face more life transitions and milestones with no guideposts.

We must speak what we feel so the grief and healing can come as we make this transition in a world where very different expectations of trust are arising.

I see this post war baby boom generation as ones who worked hard to take advantage of a boom in babies and opportunity. America rising.

My father’s third wife Marilyn is from a Polish Catholic Ohio family. They are good people. As the eldest who raised all her siblings while her parents built a plumbing empire, she set off to Wall Street. That is the American post war consensus at its best.

She never had children as she’d already raised so many. The cousins are wonderful people as well. A real family. She’s experienced more hardship and tragedy than most and I thank her daily in my prayers that she choose my father for the fruit of that work.

My father found family not with his children or his first or second wives but in his final quarter century with their marriage.

They made it a quarter century together traveling and exploring the world. Which is quite a retirement. She was a force of nature and gave my father a life and sense of security. She married a rich man and saw him through hard times.

I feel as if she thinks I’m a terrible child. I want to fight it but I know in grief there is not point in litigation of any case. It’s in the past. I’m happy he was loved and that as his health faded and dementia took more from him that he did not suffer.

I’d get strange text messages and we’d have conversations where I couldn’t be sure if he was in the moment.

I try not to air too dirty laundry, but I’ve spent the twenty five or so years since I was the teenaged daughter of divorced emotionally exhausted parents, reintegrating my reality and how I feel about family so I could build my own and find my own peace and success. I’ve found a great life at the end of that.

I share this because I know I am not unique in this. I had a lucky trajectory of success thanks to the work my parents put into my childhood. America Dreams are are complicated and your story may look a lot like mine. Weird and unlucky and lucky and persistent.

I’ve made peace with much of it and see my parents much as I see myself. Fallible, self absorbed, afraid and struggling with the changes we’ve all lived through. America asks for us to take this and make something of it.

Everything I am is thanks to the efforts of my parents. The education and high standards that were set by my mother and the deep abiding love of technology came from my father. I went into startups to impress him. I don’t know if it worked.

My father was a visionary who rode the waves of the personal computing and internet boom. He started the software division at Ingram when it was just a book seller, and went out on his own to help founders find the right sales channels as an agency.

Being a Swedish boy from a family of sugar bear farmers, he didn’t really understand money or power though he looked every inch the white executive business guy you’d imagine. Social mobility in America is real. Both up and down.

Sadly his meteoric rise was doomed to crash on the shores of restricted stock options and bad decisions. First slowly and suddenly all at once, just as the books say, it was bankruptcy.

I don’t wish to relive it but it was hard and life changed. Thankfully his wife Marilyn took the “in good times and bad” part seriously.

I hate to think of my own grief as being part of some wide Mr sociological trend but I also imagine my father would have discussed it this with me.

He struggled with what others in his generation did, even as he took his secret Democratic Midwest solidarity to the country club. He read the Fourth Turning.

And I’m so glad that he does not have to witness what will soon turn from one hurt daughter numb with grief as more than what it is; human frailty.

Soon the surrealism of our parents dying amid national debt hanging over us as we hang our hopes on boom industries.

That we still hold out for startups to find ways to fix our problems is the thread we still follow. I don’t give up.

Categories
Culture Internet Culture

Day 1699 and CQ Do You Read Me? K Go Ahead

Putting the right frequencies into the universe isn’t just woo-woo witchy girl nonsense. The general call “CQ” is for anyone listening.

The transmission is a broadcast for anyone who can read. I like to think of social media like blogging as a much more expansive and elaborate form of the tradition.

Transmitting the letters CQ on a particular radiofrequency means that the transmission is a broadcast or “General Call” to anyone listening, and when the operator sends “K” or says “Go Ahead” it is an invitation for any licensed radio station listening on that frequency to respond. 

-(CQ) Call

Humans may have evolved for much smaller scale socialization but we enter a networked world several centuries ago. The CQ sign was established protocal in 1884 according to the Practical Telegraphist.

Living with a network consciousness has been called the seventh sense. Joshua Cooper Ramo wrote a book about power and survival in an entered future in 2016 with this premise. That sense now applies across wars, commerce and aesthetics.

The urge to diversify and reach out across different networks and communities is being applied across many new closed garden internet nodes which are competing for attention and information share.

I am considering what it means to build in a world where anyone can surface almost any information at any time. The will and desire to do something in the network is its own limiting factor. But leveraging the possibilities of you find the right niche can open a lot of possibilities. So when someone issues a general call go ahead. Answer!

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1693 and I Put A Spell On You

I went down a rabbit hole today with Screaming Jay Hawkins “demented” blues classic titled “I Put A Spell On You. You should really stop and have listen to if you’ve never heard it.

Considered one of the first pieces of shock rock, Hawkins performed while he “wore a long cape, and appeared onstage by rising out of a coffin in the midst of smoke and fogaccording to Wikipedia. Spooky!

The song took on a life of its own and became so iconic that it has been covered countless times by wildly different artists.

Nina Simone has a gorgeous version that sounds like a Bond theme with big band jazz stylings. Credence Clearwater Revival’s cover with Jim Fogerty’s intense vocals was closer to Jay Hawkin’s original. But it’s the signature rhythm guitar that transitioned so well to their style. They opted to play it at Woodstock. A year later the put out Bad Moon Rising which is even spookier.

There are more modern renditions of the song. Annie Lenox has a version which was included in the Fifty Shades of Grey soundtrack and took off. Even Marilyn Manson has a creepy drum heavy cover in his signature style that’s pretty good.

As artificial intelligence starts to spook people I go back to the early adopters who knew it would feel like magic to the uninitiated.

Decades ago we had communities studying chaos magick and popularizing Lovecraftian horror as a way of understanding computational processes.

Somewhere along the line, the magic of spell casting has became less metaphor and more literal. As people struggle to understand the technology stack the easier it gets to point and say these talking sand djinn computer chips sure demonic.

Gibberish cosmic horrors and witchy women spell casting are all fun and games until we have another moral panic on our hands. And I suspect spells become less metaphor for people and a lot closer to Neal Stephenson’s Babylonian memetic death cults hijacking available limbic systems.

Snowcrash is already here and it’s in Discord channels filled with those who have no immunity at all to the mind viruses of being perfectly mirrored by a machine.

What spells will we cast? What spells will others cast on us? How do we protect ourselves? Max Borders coined a term godwords. We will need to understand them in mind wars to come. I’m glad I have a couple decade head start.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 1691 and Don’t Let History Be Written By Cthulhu Hentai Watchers

I sometimes think my best work is as a reply guy on Twitter. If the future of the Internet is to be made entirely of bots, I shall mourn the creative glory we will all lose.

We will all be missing out on the bizarrely specific interplay between post and reply guy. The signal, node, and repeater that is the feed where humans can still bounce off intuition and humor. They know the algorithm merely as the setting for their gamble.

I’ve been doing what is probably a terribly ineffectual public education campaign on artificial intelligence and its role in improving problems in the here and now.

But I am often cheeky about the ideological disagreements the more practical minded builders have with a pretty standard issue Bay Area sex cult. Having been raised adjacent to a lot of hippies, cultists, religious fundamentalists and any variety of new age woo woo Art Bell types I’m actually generally quite tolerant of our weirdos.

Of course this is a challenge as we build out the most important informational and systemic organizational technology of our species. Math has taken humans pretty far.

And mathematicians are quite often mad so I don’t see how it should be such a worry. Still I myself don’t want to be stuck inside an information hazard where I am tortured for eternity either. And therein lies the tweet

Look I’m just saying it’s my personal opinion, but I think it’s bad that the future of our knowledge graph is being made by those who get off on Lovecraft but like that’s just honestly mostly a personal human alignment thing because I don’t wanna be tentacle tortured in @RokoMijic basilisk

If you are familiar with the odd pockets of specialties you probably know that say furries are particularly good at network security and that transwomen are well represented in artificial intelligence.

Unfortunately other groups represented across the space including hardware, software and the philosophy of the space can be somewhat less wholesome than a fursona or a cute catboy.

The Rationalists have some members with odd extracurriculars in their science fiction. I’ve read some good stuff in the genre. Maybe this interest in fiction is probably how they imagine such horrific futures for us in artificial intelligence. Very improbable ones even.

So it’s on me to joke and show you where the weird can be and remind you not to take this too seriously as the experiment contains all of human knowledge. How we prioritize what is another matter. You might call that alignment.

I’m sure we are all wondering which AI safety researchers want to have sex with the many tentacled Lovecraftian old gods. The number of AI researchers with Cthulhu hentai is non-zero.

So the sake of our right to decentralized compute, and indeed our right to do math and compute, we need as many types people as possible engaging with models as possible.

Find ways to learn this new way of thinking and engaging with information and searching for information with a billion parameters at play. Some corners of the most doom and gloom road have some uncomfortable fixations. And artificial intelligence needs all of us.

Categories
Aesthetics Politics

Day 1612 and Netrunner Molotov Bang Bang Summer

Being a mere node in a large but influential network I transmit as much as I receive. I intake and reroute information as part of my own synthesis process and I appreciate that it benefits me and others. But it also does damage and today was a rough start to June by any measure.

I saw a lot today and I only pass some of it along with the thought it’s going to be netrunner bang bang Gibsonian “who respects the nation state” asymmetrical energy Summer of 2025.

Any utopian dreams of a human noosphere of higher collective intelligence must reflect upon quotidian horrors showing our baser impulses daily and summer is war season for good logistical reasons.

Ukraine appears to have blow up a number of Russian fighter jets with drones smuggled in with trucks. Let’s recall the below image from last year. Ukrainian Netrunners vaping while flying FPV drones stepped up their game hardcore today.

Ukrainian FPV drone operator smoking a vape circa summer of 2024

believe this is the first ever direct attack on any nation’s nuclear triad in history, and it succeeded – @antroyn

Twitter is awash in footage of this drone attack on Russian fighter planes being drone bombed

Operation Spider Web showed the power of asymmetrical warfare and scared the shit out of deterrence war planners as drones versus air superiority is a worry that has now become persistent reality. Nuclear triad theory needs an update.

In other closer to home news, an older white gentleman firebombed a protest along Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall in what appears to be a kind of Molotov cocktail incident over Hamas hostages. It’s my hometown so this is upsetting beyond the wider context of terrorism over the situation. I fear for further tensions in liberal college towns.

Aesthetically, because it’s going to be a high volatility volume time on Wall Street, I am enjoying to see this Twitter account picking beautiful brutalism and “80s cocaine design aesthetics” out of the ether.

If one is to survive a summer of netrunners and volatility, this look will appeal to the sorts who want hyper focus, class & glass. While no one would recommend uppers, it’s clearly part of the overall vibe of managing nervous system input for anyone looking to do violence.

Categories
Community Politics

Day 1458 and Ingroup Preference

“one day you’re in, the next you’re out”

Heidi Klum – Project Runway

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.

Categories
Startups

Day 1255 and Venture Nurture

I sometimes wonder why venture capital hasn’t coded more feminine. The cynic in me say because it makes money and money accords status. Where there is status there are men competing for it. Which is a good thing in my book.

I just happen to find the kind of investing I do to be so feminine in character. I’d never really thought of my gender when I got into startups simply because I was a founder with a problem and technology solved it for me. I was a nerd about a few very specific things and the market agreed with me.

But now as the wider world has forced me reconsider gender and how my identity gets used by others in how I do business. And I do see that I approach my investing in traditionally feminine terms. I wasn’t that kind of founder. But I am that kind of investor. 

I nurture. I love finding a weirdo working on something in a weird corner of the internet. Nothing makes me happier than telegraphing out that I am weird and getting back other weirdos. I like to listen. I like to learn. I don’t mind unpolished or outlandish or even absolutely crazy. My best deals all started in DMs

Nerds aren’t a polished people. They may lack all kinds of social graces. They will often not care about anything but the thing they are obsessing over. And I happen to find this to be a good thing.

Not everyone agrees that we should work with their lack of graces. Ruxandra Teslo discussed how weird nerds are being pushed from institutions like academia.

Weird Nerds are being driven out of academia by the so-called Failed Corporatist phenotype”

Ruxandra Teslo

I am just absolutely here for the weird nerds. They are my tribe and I see it as part of my path to help bring more of them up behind me. To nurture is a feminine virtue. I am happy to bring it to my founders. They should all feel safe coming to me because they know that I am one of them and my goal is to see them thrive.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1242 and Finding You

My “emotional work” tag has years of self exploration. One aspect of self understanding that remains elusive for so many of us is the belief that authenticity is the goal over mere improvement.

I’ve come to see the goal of emotional work as the work you do to to find yourself. You aren’t trying to improve yourself (though there may be areas you want to improve) but rather find the truth of who you are underneath conditioning from family or culture like fear and shame.

The ways that we don’t love ourselves are the ways in which we haven’t embraced who we are. That’s why authenticity over self improvement is such a helpful framing.

I’d recommend this podcast from AoA on the matter. Yes I’m in my Joe Hudson era. I’ve not decided if I want to apply for the summer master class though my first experience was so positive.

In some ways, I feel as if I’ve done so much of this type of work that my ambition is to stop looking for myself and simply be myself.

Being and becoming are fluid states so I have to recognize the flux of coming in and out of finding myself. I feel very much in myself at the moment and searching further instead of living in my current authenticity seems like a stretch. I’ll have a lot of “doing” next week so I’m sure I’ll find whatever kind of “being” I am as I go along.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1215 and Impartiality

I am taking the Connections course run by Joe Hudson’s Art of Accomplishment. I was introduced to the approach through Johnny Miller’s Nervous System Mastery course. I was lucky enough that be able to participate in one of Joe’s live coaching sessions I was so inspired by the work I saw I committed to a longer course of study.

The Connections curriculum takes you through an approach whose acronym can be shortened to VIEW.

Vulnerability

Impartiality

Empathy

Wonder

Art of Accomplishment

Today’s sessions was on impartiality. Impartiality is owning what you want without imposing it on yourself or others. It’s harder than it sounds discovering an agenda for yourself and others.

With their exercises and a partner you find your own assumptions and defensive thinking in short order

I don’t want to get reveal more than is available online but I encourage you to go check it out if it sounds interesting for your own emotional work. The podcast on Impartiality is available for anyone to listen online.