I’m with a group of some of my favorite eccentrics. It’s a barn raising kind of vibe as we collect our wits in real life.
It’s a real weird group that operates under Chatham House rules so I’ll keep it to my own experience.
One of my favorite discussions came from a a successful financial executive who farms. He’s an inspiration to anyone who wants to be think about their relationship with the industrial scale world. He came from a family of farmers and returned.
He told a story about how his grandparents farm produced the food that his own family ate as recently as three generations ago. Now they don’t eat any of the food they produce anymore. It is sold into a systems.
I feel a kinship with this experience as I worked for an American heritage brand that had lost its way but had once dressed a generation of American women living American lives.
When the new president had one firm expectation for the quality of the work our product must demonstrate she had a sins tear. Every one of us needed to make clothing we would wear ourselves.
It was a group of luxury executives so their expectations for style and quality was more LVMH than mall brand. And not did force a higher standard. What could be sold and what we ourselves would wear were entirely different beasts. And we had to build the skills to make the clothing we’d wear as consumers of artisan clothes.
It was not a financial success. Private equity came to eat it. No one I know is still at the brand. But for a brief moment of time we made clothing we’d would want to wear ourselves.
Yesterday we enjoyed the uncomfortable tension of a cease fire announcement in the Israeli-Iranian conflict that America had just entered that no one was sure was real.
Sure the president had said so inside the heaven ban built to purpose social network Truth Social, but we had no basis for belief in that without hearing from Iran or Israel.
Newspapers sent out alerts that resolved into “unconfirmed” once you hit the landing page. Thanks guys but maybe cool your jets on the alerts?
I read Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine when it came out in 2007 with a mix of skepticism and head nodding. Her thesis was that disasters are used to push through unpopular market reforms. I remain skeptical of presenting neoliberalism as exclusively disaster capitalism.
I alas myself lack the crucial qualification for being a fan of Klein’s work as I am not a socialist. I like the market reforms and doubt chaos is the only vehicle through which they can be passed. At this point in our history, chaos is leading us more towards statist solutions
Nevertheless I remain skeptical of the narratives from state power no matter what solution the state is pushing. I like a market based solution as much as the next bourgeois pig, but I’m no fan of the state overriding its people or its businesses.
The problem we have now isn’t just Shock Doctrine or disaster capitalism driving outcomes. It was mostly disaster authoritarianism in my opinion.
The reason it is so unsettling to have no source of reliable information or institutional trust in our information is because we are now living in the age of Slop Doctrine. You can take it if you like Naomi.
It’s impossible to sort out what reality is winning even when it’s coming from a head of state. A million competing narratives from untold decentralized sources of information now compete to confused and unsettle us. The psy-ops aren’t even run by humans anymore.
I’d love for us to collapse that state of uncertainty that comes from multiple entangled competing realities into consensus reality.
Alas when I searched for quantum reality collapse terminology all I found was a LiDAR imaging company for architectural documentation. Their website doesn’t suggest much of anything invoking quantum states except insofar as one hopes that by using their imaging your buildings won’t do so.
And so we are left swimming in the slop doctrine confusion in which old ways of validating information are entirely useless to us. Slop Doctrine is here and it sucks.
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.
It seems easier to send electromagnetic waves at different frequencies than create a sealed oxygen chamber but consumer is weird and the military and elite athletics tested HBOT whereas mere hippies played around with PEMF.
A temperature setting swaps for 4 separate vibration settings Delta Waves, Theta Waves (Schaumann Reponse, Alpha and Beta Waves
So it’s qualia only here on the good vibrations but I am excited to try it out. I can’t exactly feel the vibrations unlike in other clinical settings where I’ve experienced much more intense (it’s measured in gauss or Tesla) but infrared warmth is a nice experience even if the vibrations don’t do much. But I will report on it.
I enjoy British comedy for all the usual reasons. Witty, acerbic, and dry cynicism make for a good laugh even if it seems like a challenging culture to actually live in.
Nerds of my elder millennial era were introduced to Monty Python by our parents but there are many others perhaps more worthy of constant quotation. It’s a diverse genre and helps manage stress about politics.
And sure every week has a “come see the violence inherent in the system” moment these days but it takes a really special kind of stupid to mount a four stages of a crisis narrative campaign in a matter of days. Political satire Yes Minister delivers an excellent example of this tactic.
To set the scene, Sir Humphrey Appleby the bureaucrat (excuse me, civil servant) and his elected minister who eventually fails up to Prime Minister Sir Richard Wharton. The episode is called “A Victory for Democracy” which as you can imagine it is not.
The stages of a crisis are as follows
Stage One: “Nothing is going to happen.”
Stage Two: “Something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.”
Stage Three: “Maybe we should do something about it, but there’s nothing we can do.”
Stage Four: “Maybe there was something we could have done, but it’s too late now.”
It’s a very fast set of news cycles when you resign yourself immediately to stage four. Things pop off and escalate and soon we are faced with an ambivalent leadership response that shrugs blame as easily as it did responsibility.
I had a preventative care appointment at the doctor today and I came away from the experience wondering why I bothered.
I felt like a fool for checking on something before it had become a problem. It was merely a concern and no answers could be found without a substantial escalation in investment and time. Which I chose not to dod.
I will still get a bill whether it’s 90 seconds or 90 minutes which I do understand. But does it have to be so “escalate to maximum” or “just ignore it” as the poles of preventative care? Can’t it be more of a spectrum of options? And because “fuck you that’s why” I have no more certainty on the problem than when I started.
And that’s not how I want to experience the care and maintenance of anything under my care in my life let alone my body. Our house, our relationships, our business, our car, heck our chickens deserve better than “don’t know why you bother” care. I bother because I care.
We have a home maintenance sheet excel, a seasonal rotation system for disaster supplies, and an inventory management system for key household goods.
Yeah, we are that kind of family. My husband has opinions on label makers. I have strong opinions on sweater brushes and leather are.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Sure that’s a very Mary Poppins kind of approach to life but I think it’s a worthy one. I want to live a life where I am responsible to my own life.
I read some Charles Dickens today. No this isn’t a Great Expectations joke. Rather, I read the first seven paragraphs of his 900 page novel Bleak House.
[They were asked to] read the first seven paragraphs of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House out loud to a facilitator and then translate each sentence into plain English
If you are a knowledge professional you better hope you are a four but social media comments suggest most of us are not.
This methodology doesn’t even try articulate level 5. And as someone who occasionally sees what a real 1% outlier looks like I don’t disagree. Our best are in a league of their own.
So obviously as American funded “college for all” it was clear not all college attendees would on the right side of average. And as it turns out, the English majors at highly subsidized state universities (mostly white girls incidentally) had a lot of trouble understanding Dickens’s British family court tragedy.
I also don’t want to read that many pages of fog metaphors, and I have an entire tag dedicated to forced metaphors.
I took the test (speaking my answer into my phone) and it was harder than you think to simplify but I had the vocabulary.
Like those other white girls I am unlikely to be in the 1% of literacy when it comes 19th century British literature. Surely in my own skill stack (and it’s overlapping areas of expertise) I can approach 2SD on things. I suspect this blog and my general internet presence suggests I can do Level 4 reading. We think around what we can.
That seems adequate given I contribute what I like and communicate what is enjoyable on my own spaces. Here I am plodding along contributing sixteen hundred days of writing to the public discourse which is its own proof of literacy. It’s several novels worth of training data for our artificial intelligences.
I think about how much I do or don’t want to contribute to the maw of publicly indexed Internet because I believe we get better if we all contribute to this public good.
Our future is a shared coordination problem requiring we can comprehend and contribute to our commons. Maybe I understand enough Dickens to get by. He maybe has a dimmer view of legalistic thinking than I do. But I’m sure he’d see plenty of wretches in our times too.
I have been contemplating “an ideal routine” as soon as I felt the pressure of showing up for first grade. How to manage the energy the outside world requires from you while making sure you have done everything possible to manage your body to produce adequate energy.
Morning routines, what’s in her bag, every day carry, and optimal packing strategies all derive from a need to see how others are coping with the demands of life. You can aspire to various ideals of fitness, nutrition, style and parenting if you could just get the right routine with the right tools. Right?
I’m aspiring to restart learning new toolsets for building …everything. From design to marketing software to muscles to my hormonal profile. Building the life you want is deceptively close if you can manage yourself.
Life feels malleable at the moment. And who is going to stop me? Maybe I accidentally fix a problem for myself and find I’ve got a tool or insight that might benefit you. The chaos of old ways fall apart means new routines and folkways must be built.
I don’t want to betray myself by overreaching and pushing as I am so often finding hard limits the hard way. I like to go hard and rest. But reality has become so much less reliable that I wonder if I must compensate even more for the chaos with steadying flows of my own.
I am a pretty informal person. I don’t hold any institutional authority. The interests I represent are my own. I speak for myself.
Obviously I care a great deal about my family and my friends and want to reflect well on them but I can only speak for myself. This is a given in an age where big institutions often find themselves frustrating the interests of normal people. And people take a stand.
So when I find myself haggling with medical insurance or trying to wrap my head around a set of requests from someone claiming to be a representative of a large power, I think back to a viral tweet by Patrick McKenzie (@patio11), about the efficacy of the dangerous professional voice.
The “Dangerous Professional Voice” is less about aggression and more about clarity, formality, and signaling that you understand the system and expect to be taken serious.
What are my options?’”
McKenzie suggests this phrase, calmly and professionally delivered, often prompts the other party to reveal escalation paths or alternatives that might not otherwise be offered.
The voice suggests it solving it is a given. Getting down to business and showing you mean business. Even if you are an informal person sometimes you may want to use this dangerous professional voice as you go about your day. Share if it works. Patrick says he enjoys hearing about use in the wild.
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.
