Tag: War

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Aesthetics Politics Travel

Day 1891 and So Much for Santorini or Status Hierarchies for Abundant Ages

If you watch me closely (which would be weird but I make it easy enough) you have surely noticed I spend much of my life traveling.

I’ve got no training in psychology but it sure seems like a certain personality type takes their childhood traumas and does exposure therapy till it becomes enjoyable.

I had intended for another trip to the general Mediterranean area in the spring to see family and work undisturbed by the American media timezone distractions. Now I am unsure if that will be feasible.

I am guessing that the sort of people who go to Sicily, Santorini and Cyprus to soak up the sun may find this Iranian conflict putting a wrench in their island hopping. Where will they go instead? Cartel wars bleed into the Caribbean and Bitcoin zillionaires setting up economic zones might make other things tricky. And oh the fuel costs will be ruinous.

War certainly makes me reconsider standard air bus style flying near any seas that connect to conflict areas but not too long ago I sat in a Turkish airport where “final boarding for Damascus” went over the loud speaker so maybe I’m making too much of it. Though I’m glad I enjoyed Istanbul over the winter as anything bordering Iran is now unnecessary risk.

For a world where speculative fiction bull case for artificial intelligence wiped off billions in market capitalization, we sure aren’t taking very seriously the kinetic effects of extreme uncertainty and change. Well, ironically maybe Pete Hegseth might be.

If we do make it through the Jackpot to the other side of the singularity, or just through this regional war situation, I would bet humans will find ourselves getting back to status hierarchies and power games.

If all our consumption needs are met, there will always be hierarchies. Wait your best friend summers in Block Island too? Or are those the Finnish slides from the Comme des Garçons show? Let me just call up “insert social scene’s patron billionaire” as everyone is headed to Big Sky for fresh powder this weekend.

It’s endlessly that sort of thing if you are inclined towards Bourdieu’s Distinction: a social critique of the judgment of taste. If class predicts taste then we mimic the taste we think we ought to have to be a certain kind of person. I came across a sweet hand illustrated essay on the matter recently.

If we can have anything we like, then taste becomes finer and finer grained. The rich know this already and the rest of us just might find out if we survive to an abundance era. And as I’d like to do that maybe I be reconsidering heading out to sea. Caribbean, Ionian, Bosphorus or otherwise.

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Politics Preparedness Startups

Day 1887 and Trust Me Bro

I don’t feel terrific so I’ll keep this as a ramble but with some links. I fear some sort of Rubicon has was crossed, which we will only recognize in hindsight, in the fight for property rights in America versus the tyranny of failing state capacity.

I am referring to the contract dispute between foundation model developer Anthropic and American Secretary of War Hegseth that boiled over on Friday night as some sort of Murderbot surveillance subplot parsed only by lawyers, policy wonks and anyone who remembers the patriotism of Chelsea Manning.

Right before America and Israel went all Epic Fury on Iran over the weekend, somehow it was felt a messy public fight between defense contractor and the civilian oversight of our military was ok? Good thing everyone is too distracted to care.

Funny how one can go from cheering on our military’s capacity for innovation one week and the next to be waving one’s arms screaming “no oh no no no” but that’s just politics as run by the instincts of reality television I suppose.

The best writing on this so far has been Dean Ball (who worked in this Trump administration on its AI position statement not so long ago) who feels that Hegseth took an approach on renegotiating a contract with a frontier AI model developer that has consequences.

Loosely and I am missing much Anthropic had its previous contract to parse classified documents in the Department of Defense (now the Department of War) negotiated by the prior administration. Some aspects of this contract wasn’t going to work for the Trump administration. Anthropic didn’t want to change it and Hegseth threatened to call Anthropic a supply chain risk unless it complied. They didn’t and Sam Altman signed a deal.

Wrapped up in this is that of course we all eventually comply with Leviathan who has the monopoly on violence. I don’t claim any expertise here but lots of people understand defense contractor law.

On its face Anthropic looks like the moral high ground and the position all capitalists and private property respected would prefer. However, it’s in Dean’s words, a bit weird for a company to tell the state that a private corporation has a say in policy as opposed to our democratic institutions.

Anthropic is essentially using the contractual vehicle to impose what feel less like technical constraints and more like policy constraints on the military

This is all complicated by the model developer having wishes for frontier AI development to be nationalized and for their work in particular to be safeguarded by a different political administration. It has become a right versus left thing as it was bound to do.

Now Anthropic gets to enjoy the full throated defense of its industry peers and even conservative policy makers like Dean, because our current state capacity is not what I’d call excellent when it comes to our civilian government capacity. Honestly our military still seems to be crushing it.

Secretary Hegseth looked a bit like he was over reaching in his command that he get his demands met. Americans are very touchy about surveillance of if’s citizens and much less touchy about autonomous weapons so it’s natural to be a bit suspicious if you are a millennial who remembers the Global War on Terror. If you are Zoomer who doesn’t know who Chelsea Manning is please go ask Claude.

However it’s not at all clear that Hegseth’s original negotiations were out of hand as of course it’s the state who decides legal use not the private company and we are meant to have laws, judicial process and all the rest. It’s just that we don’t. So what on earth do we do about it? Trust me bro is not a policy.

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Biohacking Internet Culture Politics

Day 1886 and Whoop There It Is

Quite a weekend for Americans and the wider Persian Gulf. Let us hope it is resolved swiftly and with the least loss of life possible.

It happened quickly. On Friday night policy types were arguing about artificial intelligence with our department of war about use cases and contacts. And then on Saturday we bombed Iran and they bombed pretty much every neighbor they have. No wonder they had a midnight deadline eh?

I’ll stick to human interest here but Chief of Staff Susie Wiles appeared to be wearing a Whoop tracker in a secure room which was confirmed by the company’s CEO by tweet.

The original concern being that some fitness trackers break NSA protocols as they have audio recording and other data recording which wouldn’t be appropriate in a dark room type the situation room.

Interestingly Whoop is approved by the NSA for use in these situations. Per the CEO the Whoop does not include a microphone, GPS, or cellular capability of any kind and has long been on the NSA approved PED list.

I myself wear both an Apple Watch and a Whoop everywhere but I rarely need to be out of the prying ears of recoding devices but it’s good to know.

Whoop’s CEO joked that given the success of the mission Susie Wiles must have had a green recovery score (quality sleep, low resting heart rate and high HRV) though I imagine she must be feeling the stress now that it’s over.

I wonder if her score worse than mine. I needed steroids and antibiotics to manage the flare post dental work and my body is under more strain than you’d imagine.

It’s somehow nice to know that the most powerful people on the planet use the same tools as I do to track their biometrics. From billionaire founders like Bryan Johnson to the Chief of Staff of the President to little old me. We all wear the same track. If you want a referral code here you go.

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Aesthetics Politics

Day 1852 and The Nothing

I did not have a good weekend. I feel the emotions of humanity’s current transitional phase too keenly. There are the wondrous upswings of hope and deep darkness that consumes anyone who bears witness.

I feel compelled to bear witness. Even though I know it harms me. Even when I know I am staring into a war, purpose designed to push me into or out of the myriad conflicting agendas of state, corporate, faith and cultural powers. A thousand agendas who wish us submit to their will.

I wish I had the guidance of the generation who led the world through modernity’s war torn emergence into our current networked age. Without knowing our future, would they be able to use their past to help us see through the fog that clouds our present?

I find solace in the children’s literature made by artists who lived through brutal dehumanizing totalitarian regimes. They told stories with truths so clear a child could grasp them.

I return to the works of Tove Jansson and Michael Ende again and again as I try to make sense of what it means to be human. Ironic that I should find human truths in authors who wrote of fantastical worlds filled with whimsical trolls and flying luck dragons.

And yet truths that seem crystalline in fiction distort when I apply the lens of my present. I recall Corinthian’s 1 “Through A Glass, Darkly” and know I am not the first to have such troubles. I will not be the last.

Ende wrote a fictional formless entity called “The Nothing” in The Neverending Story. The people of the realm Fantastica voluntarily leap into The Nothing. It has an irresistible pull.

Worse still, the destructive phenomenon changes the Fantasticans who become lies in the human world. Fantasticans who are destroyed by entering “The Nothing,” don’t just vanish. They reappear in our human world as false beliefs, deceptions, and propaganda that people mistake for reality. The symbolism is clear.

When we suppresses imagination and our inner life, our “lost” fantasies don’t disappear. As in shadow theory, they return as toxic narratives, distortions, and myths that make people “blind” to the difference between reality and illusion.

I do not wish for any of us to kill who we are. We walk into The Nothing and whatever version of ourselves comes out the other side is not the truth. I can only pray that I am not willingly walking into The Nothing as I bear witness.

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Community Politics

Day 1829 and Frigid Individualist, Snagging and Bagging Narco Terrorists and 2026 Forever War Time

The New Year shouldn’t really get going until after Epiphany. I’m not a Catholic, but I think the Holy Nights are a time for prayer and looking inward.

Alas, we seem to start the new near with a bang every year now. Concerns about Iran’s currency crisis was the big story in geopolitics as the chattering classes concerned themselves with socialist mayors in America were going on about collectivism’s warmth. I will take frigid individualism thanks to

Today I woke up to news of an early morning “snag and bag” of the President of Venezuela Nicholas Maduro and his wife being taken my American troops to stand trial.

The front page of the New York Times around 11am GMT

I’m in Europe so we had a bit more time with the news before Trump addressed the nation. It’s a little chilly where I am and I’m still worked up about the the warm fuzzy communism of the Zoomer youth who seem to think all problems are solved with more money and never seem to realize that it comes at gunpoint.

And despite running on an explicitly anti-war platform, Trump is now giving a press conference suggesting American oil companies are up for a forever war run by Marco Rubio. Rough day for our Secretary of State who is also probably as worried about Iran as anyone.

I suppose it’s now or never for a number of things. Toppling regimes named as narco-states and cutting off oil and capital flows as China does exercises in the straits. Things are malleable indeed.