Tag: Work

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 804 and Organic All Natural Human Brain Brewed Montana Content

As a sign of just how fast the world is changing, my goal of making it to a thousand straight days of writing is officially pointless. ChatGPT4 is pretty good at mimicking all styles of writing. AI has come to rescue us from the drudgery of being a workdcel just as it once rescued my brethren shape rotators from doing math. Rejoice!

Fortunately I started this whole blog for personal amusement and feel entirely unthreatened by the looming reality that writing done entirely by humans is officially over. If anything I feel modestly relieved.

I’d be happy to jump cut to the Culture and move aboard a psychotic space ship with a name like Weeping Somnambulist. I just combined Ian M Banks with the Expanse but I’ve got omnivore tastes in my science fiction. The point is it’s fucking cool that the machines are coming. And if it’s not cool I won’t know the damn difference. I’ll be dead or in some other simulation and I am not worse off than I’m currently.

Two men on a bus meme. “The AI Took My Job”

I’ve been repeating as something of a mantra the Hunter S Thompson quote recently.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

I’ve never actually read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas nor have I seen the movie. But I’ve absorbed enough of the basic essence of the “all gas no breaks” mentality from across multiple generations that I think I get the gist of it. Though a reminder to actually go to the source material.

The point being is that none of us has a fucking clue and sometimes you’ve got to go fuck around and find out. So I’ll be doing that. If it doesn’t worked out I’ll just chalk it up to consciousness expansion. And if I’m lucky maybe I get some new machine friends too. But I’m still going to write just for me using my mushy brain synaptic firings that I generated right here in Montana.

Categories
Finance Politics Preparedness

Day 800 and Small Potatoes

It’s nice when a round number crops up in my daily journey of writing every single day. It’s even better when it’s colliding with the wider narratives of humans. If you aren’t paying attention to the news, Silicon Valley bank had a run on Thursday and was taken over by FDIC on Friday. Now the powers that be decide our fates. On day 800 we wait to see if anything has changed about capitalism.

I’m small potatoes so I’m scrambling for survival as much as anyone. But I’ve got a reasonably good head on me and I’ve seen this movie before. Literally. I watched Margin Call a dozen times this year. My family also went bankrupt in the 2001 crash and I was working in startup land during the 2008 crash. So this isn’t exactly my first ride on the roller coaster. I still get sick to my stomach though.

I think we are all about to have a significant conversation in America about trust and who is looking out for whom. I have my theories on how it plays out and over what time horizon. Very few of those scenarios and involves actually letting the american economy implode. But some heads will need to roll it’s just going to depend on the fates.

I really don’t feel like writing through some of this as it’s both personally traumatic because I’m a human being but also because I don’t know where this lands any more than you do. A lot depends on who blinks and who we want to scapegoat and how much we want to tolerate the unpleasant realities of who matters most. Not to be dramatic but every empire rests on a pile of skulls. It’s the degree to which this is literally true that changes over the years.

Categories
Culture

Day 797 and Women’s Day

I remember a gentler more optimistic time when I received a “holiday” like International Women’s Day with some amount of positivity. I’ll grant it was mostly as an excuse for marketing and public relations but it didn’t offend me. Now in the harsh reactionary landscape of 2023 I fucking loathe it.

There was a time when I discussed issues like equity and inclusion and felt proud to ask for more space for women in the many male dominated spaces where I spent my time. I like startups, economics, math, science fiction and libertarianism so you could say I’m used to be one of the few women. And I never felt like I didn’t belong.

That is until I started taking up space. Once you’ve asked to be treated as not just one of the boys but as the leader of the pack you start to notice the snarls. Still I didn’t mind. Being top dog is always going to involve some fights. Let’s just say I’m glad women were allowed into the back door of the startup economy by handling Ecommerce. I didn’t mind having to earn my way in by playing in girly spaces like shopping. The money spends.

But I didn’t have to fight any men to do it. I found a way in on my own terms even though I might have preferred something a little less clearly marked as “for girls!” Because I’ve come to believe that no one wants a more diverse world. Diversifying industries that felt safe to men like startups was fought tooth and nail because who wants to give up ground that they fought hard to gain. I’m sure the men all bleed for their positions and nobody wants more competition. I get it.

It’s all a bit of polite fiction because the reality is power is always earned (or taken) and if you think life is a zero sum game you might believe me gaining power is your loss. I don’t believe in zero sum so I’m a little more “win win” but I get it. I see your pain.

So it’s with that dose of realism that I’ll ask you to pardon me if I am skeptical of the value of some corporate holiday to celebrate women’s contributions to the world. We are half the fucking planet. Of course we contributed to the fucking outcome! I don’t need a damn day for that.

Just because men kept women in the house (or cave or whatever) for a couple thousand years doesn’t mean we didn’t build this world too. We bore your children and made your food and kept the hearth.

We gave your dumb asses advice and kept you civilized because that’s what you asked from us. And yet somehow in modernity, men resented women for civilization even though you sure seem like you love the power and wealth that came with civilizing.

The new masculinity Internet influencers say it’s so emasculating to stop being brutes. It’s these women and their demands for respect and inclusion that is so burdensome. Fuck feminized society they howl. Return to tradition! Ok, so which one is it buddy? You want to be a warrior but you also like wearing those Gucci loafers too.

So yeah fuck all the way off. In fact, let’s get grosser. Suck my blood cunt. No one is buying me off with a holiday. It’s tacky. Like buying flowers for your wife after you did something bad. Just own up to it and fuck the flowers. Be a man.

So that’s my message on International Women’s Day. Be a man. It’s what everyone wanted right? Oh and suck my bloody cunt. Let’s stop with the special holidays and get on with building the world together. You know, like we used to do.

Categories
Culture Internet Culture

Day 794 and Willful Ignorace

I had a little burst of energy this morning that I decided to use being indignant on the internet. It’s usually a hobby that I find energizing. I realize this makes me kind of asshole but who amongst us hasn’t enjoyed the occasional outburst of righteous indignation.

Perhaps it’s a sign of me getting old but I absolutely letting rip on someone for being stupid. I think the internet is sadly a real pressure release for society as we’ve got fewer and fewer spaces in which it’s appropriate to be even modestly rude to the willfully ignorant. So now you’ve got the occasional Battle Royale on Twitter.

It’s probably it not as effective as throwing a punch but maybe still helps cover up some of the pain of an atomized society. Like a Tylenol over a bone break, it’s only dulling the pain a little. But sorry we’ve decided that oxycodone is too dangerous because we’ve got a nanny state of neoliberals and no one is allowed to do anything dangerous anymore. So now you get Tylenol and Advil and you can tell at someone on the internet.

I got annoyed because some commenter called me casually racist. Which isn’t to say that I’m not racist. Everyone is a little bit racist. But in the instance she was insinuating something that required a gross misreading of my original text.

I’d said it is easier to perform the skill set of being pretty if you are rich and white. This is apparently now racist. Except you dumb ignorant midwit I actually read my critical theory texts. Let me give you a tasting. Go read some fucking Foucault you absolutely lazy slob. Read a good damn book.

I am saying that [pretty is a skill set] because of the racism of our classist, not fully decolonized, system of oppression, it makes it much easier for white cis female faces to be classed and coded as pretty. This is a function of how distorted “pretty” as a concept is, as it’s simply a set of skills we perform to adhere to an ever shifting set of conditional whiteness over layers of financial and social inequality. It’s a fairly basic gatekeeping of the female body to keep the standards of the white colonial bodies.

Me

Look I read the texts. I believe that this is actually happening. But you cannot go throwing shit around being stupid when the actual power wants you to be blind to it. Read a god damn book children. People been fighting longer than you’ve been alive and woke.

Categories
Emotional Work Startups

Day 792 and Level Ups

I know I am courting a bit of a crash tomorrow because I can feel just how much energy this week took. But I am feeling emotionally like I leveled up. I looked at a few of my emotional patterns this week pretty head on and redrew some boundaries. And this always improves my work performance.

The upside of journaling your thoughts and emotions is you have a back catalog of your own thoughts to compare against your eventual conclusions. You can look back and spot patters in your thinking and tie them together. Writing everyday can be excruciating but I never regret having done it.

I have to always remind myself that it takes a fair amount of effort and a high tolerance for being wrong in public. You have to get used to people disliking you and finding you distasteful. People want to put their emotional response onto you and the hard work of being an adult is not accepting what isn’t yours.

If you can tie that kind of self reflection into your professional life you get all kinds of unexpected level ups. You tell people about your own responsibilities and they trust you with theirs. You get to build great things together by building on shares humanity. The best business relationships I have are the ones where we understand what value each of our personal lives brings to counteracting of own limitations and blind spots. I’ll always work with someone who leads with their humanity first. Big visions get worked out together by trusting each others talents.

Categories
Emotional Work Startups

Day 785 and Not Overwhelmed

Life feels pretty nonstop for me at the moment. I’ve got three deals I’m working on that are about to go out for fundraising, I’ve got my own fundraising to do, and I’ve got eyes on me from press. Normally this would be a full plate for me but I am taking a trip to celebrate my father’s 80th Birthday this week.

Normally I’d be panicking about packing. And I did have a few little moments of anxiety about getting everything done today. But I’m actually looking forward to the trip even as I have all this professional excitement.

My father loves startups. He just lives for everything about technology. He never missed a Comdex when I was a kid. He still goes to CES even now just to see what might be out there. His enthusiasm for this world is clearly where I got it.

So I think I might be looking forward to bringing all of the energy around chaotic.capital to his birthday. My father wasn’t a particularly demonstrative father but I know he’s really proud of the career I’ve pursued. So it seems fitting that for a celebration of his life and this major milestone that I get to bring some of the world he loves so much with me.

Categories
Homesteading Politics

Day 784 and Endocrine

In case you haven’t heard, everyone is bracing for apocalypse. Well, that’s just the headline to get your attention. Everyone is watching the decline in American state capacity as we struggle with distrust across all forms of institutional power.

It’s really challenging to discuss this subject as it is unpleasant to look bad things happening straight in the eye. But if you have read some history, maybe own a copy of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, you’ve probably got theories. But I understand that it’s hard to look at worst case scenarios. Your life may still look normal. But know that for millions of people the consensus is that shit sucks.

I’m not placing any moral or ethical judgements on the wide variety of kooks & characters that have traditionally espoused the various flavors of doom. I don’t particularly care for my compatriots in doom included in the Vanity Fair piece. They don’t like me either. I will self identify as degenerate libertarian who is skeptical of governmental and corporate power.

I’ve been called a Bolshevik by the Christian right and a crypto fascist by the DSA so I’ll assume your average rational mind will recognize that perhaps that the common cause of an America in decline is a bigger fight than tribal affiliations. If you cannot retain a calm mind in your analysis I hope I can convince you that this is a problem.

She thought something had gone wrong with us physically too. “Endocrine systems get fried. There’s too much cortisol, you’ve been running on adrenaline, eventually you tap out. Everyone feels nuts right now,” she said, “because what on earth are we supposed to do with the fact that we’ve had this incredible rate of change for so long. We think we’re keeping up with it, but our bodies are like, ‘Oh, actually no. We have no idea what’s going on.’ ”

Dissident Fringe

We are all overreacting to everything because we’ve come out of the stress of three years of a pandemic that has overlapped with such an incredible array of natural, industrial and political disasters anyone would be edgy. Oh and remember how we had 4 years of Trump? We are acting nuts because stress made us more reactive.

Some argue the great weirding goes back much further but the point is that we are all victims of a long now of persistent anxiety, exhaustion and adrenaline. I don’t know if we can even hear each other trying to grapple with problems in good faith because we are just so tired from being driven nuts by all this.

Imagine a future where this kind of endocrine draining stress simply never relents. And that’s the future I’m earning you about. Everything gets a little harder and less reliable. You trust everyone a little less. It’s harder to eat healthy and maintain healthy habits. It’s harder to trust mainstay civic services like schools, police, and the postal service. The roads are worse and infrastructure is crumbling and do I really need to tell you? Use your imagination

Decline is hard on the body and you need to be planning on how to manage disruptions if only so you can keep at the business of raising your family, going to work and trying to have a life.

If your ambitions outstrips these goals and you’d like to make money on the realignment of the world you will need to do more, build more, investment more. So I’d probably do some basic resilience work so you can maintain focus. If you want to make money trying to solve for the many customers all looking for solutions to all the shit that is going wrong you might want to stabilize your life with basic preparedness.

I don’t know what systems will evolve. But if we don’t start investing in them now we are in serious trouble. I’ve been investing in solutions that are venture scale for sometime. If you want to join me on this journey, DM me on Twitter or join as an LP

Categories
Homesteading Politics Preparedness

Day 782 and Vanity Fair

I am extremely proud of being a subject in Jame’s Pogue’s new Vanity Fair piece. It is about managed decline, the death of state capacity, and whispers of a post state world. I’d say it’s a bombshell except I think there are some very sober people discussing how life in a chaotic world filled with distrust might work out. Spoiler alert, not great.

“Preppers, techies, hippies, and yuppies are converging on the American West, the safest place to “exit” a society gone haywire.”

The Dissident Fringe

I worry that the next frontier in American cultural battles will be figuring out how to stay out of our versions of “the troubles.” And I don’t like the sound of that.

I think you may find yourself agreeing with me. I don’t want a culture war and I certainly don’t want it to turn into a hot war. Apparently that makes anyone who agrees with the above premise a dissident fringe. Didn’t realize it was controversial to enjoy civilization. But I am in fact comfortable saying I don’t want any kind of war.

But I’m not sure everyone feels that way. So in a show of our seriousness we’ve decamped to the imagined demilitarized zone of the Rockies. I don’t want any chaos but I am literally betting the house on us having a bumpy ride maintaining course in America as we deal with long delayed issues from infrastructure, education, logistics and supply chains to capital markets and trade. I intend to capitalize on this uncertainty. You can do so with me if you’d like as an LP in chaotic capital.

If you are curious about how it might play out, in this nearly 9,000 word opus, every angle of how to survive in the American West in the near future is captured in empathetic detail by Pogue. It’s almost like reading William Gibson in how it shows a present that feels a bit off. Cyberpunk right before the Jackpot, but make it from a gonzo Hunter S Thompson type. I appreciate it on purely aesthetic grounds. You should read it.

But practically how do we all muddle through a greyzone war that has no agreed upon values, including whether the enlightenment & liberalism are worthwhile?

As we fight it out as a nation, most of us are just going to continue living our lives as crashing stare capacity and war over institutional norms gets in the way of raising a family and doing business. And it’s this scenario—a muddling, unhappy, middle course—that most people in this sphere tend to predict is coming. It’s not fun but it’s not the end of the world.

It is my personal belief that we are struggling to find any alignment because regardless of your personal politics, religion, or even overriding philosophy, your actual physical body is just fucking done with this bullshit. I mean it literally. We feel it in our bodies.

Endocrine systems get fried. There’s too much cortisol, you’ve been running on adrenaline, eventually you tap out. Everyone feels nuts right now,” she said, “because what on earth are we supposed to do with the fact that we’ve had this incredible rate of change for so long.”

Julie Fredrickson – Vanity Fair March 2023

We think we’re keeping up with it, but our bodies are like, ‘Oh, actually no. We have no idea what’s going on.’”

It’s too much stress on the system and something is going to have to change.

If you read the piece you will see just how much trust is lost amongst all parties that make up the American experiment. The cherry on top is that our nation state distrusts our foes & but they also distrust us the citizens and their desire for more freedom. It’s a messy battle for meaning and power.

And as Americans we’ve had the exorbitant burden of the dollar being the global currency. What happens when we no longer trust any actors on the global stage? Distrust our fellow citizens, distrust our currencies, distrust our institutions, distrust our enemies? It sure gets hard to run an economy without trust.

We need to build new systems we can trust or our bodies and minds will give out. Simple as.

I don’t know what systems will evolve. But if we don’t start investing in them now we are in serious trouble. I’ve been investing in solutions that are venture scale for sometime. Ifyou want to join me on this journey, DM me on Twitter or join as an LP.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 781 and Accelerating

I am accelerating into the turn that is my extremely busy life. The global weirding is upon us, as I’ve been predicting for more than two years publicly on this blog and even further back in the press and on Twitter.

I was initially afraid that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with a faster life. One reason we moved to Montana was to keep the pace of our personal lives calm and level so professional obligations wouldn’t overwhelm us. And yet as more and more obligations and responsibilities became part of my daily reality, I wanted to shrink under the weight.

But I am not shrinking. I am standing tall. Sure I feel like I’m failing every day and I hate the feeling that I could disappoint folks who have placed capital and trust with me.

I am however sure that over the time horizon I have set I am doing things the right way. Everything else is luck and repeating the positive daily habits that have produced results in the past.

I feel happy with the acceleration if I stop giving the fear any oxygen. I’m starting to remember how I used to wield my talents. But this time I’ve got the benefits of five years of emotional maturing from intensive family systems therapy. I see my old coping mechanisms and bad habits withering as I bring the full maturity of my emotional journey to bear.

If life is going to keep getting faster and faster then I suppose my only choice is to enjoy the thrill of acceleration and trust that I’ve done the work to stay on the ride.

Categories
Culture Internet Culture

Day 771 and The Chaos In You

I’m a high school drop out. But in a sort of non-traditional sense. My first encounter with disability happened in the wake of living abroad as a sophomore. I found myself simply not attending my junior and senior years of high school. It was a complex situation.

My mother battled against teachers and administrators using the ADA and standardized tests as her weapons. The College Board as a series of 34 tests called the CLEP that gives you credit for having college level knowledge. It’s a very good short cut for self learners & autodidacts to get credit for what they know. And it’s way cheaper.

Between CLEP and AP exams I was able to provide a pretty convincing portrait of competence to both colleges and my shitty college preparatory school. It was enough to get me into university and to extract a high school diploma despite a record of non-attendance. Reasonable accommodation wasn’t really a thing at the time but you could bury the fuckers in paperwork. A tactic less ethical parents than my mother have surely realized by now.

I was a bit of an orphan in my class as I was quite frankly never there. What teacher could possibly vouch for knowing me? It’s because of this lack of attendance that don’t really consider myself a graduate since the diploma is merely function of testing out. A fancier version of getting one’s GED as it were. So when it came time for various teachers to do things like writing quotes for graduating seniors nobody wanted me.

My French teacher from my sophomore year (otherwise known as the year abroad) must have grabbed the short end of some straw as she ended up having to say some shit about me and opted for the Nietzsche dancing star pablum.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star

I felt terrible for her. She had to find a suitable quote for a troublemaker of the worst sort. I was institutionally non compliant. We hate when people have too much chaos in themselves. Sure culture is mostly made from outliers but don’t be too weird.

Sure dancing stars sound poetic but these days Nietzsche is just another coded message board signal for Leopold and Loeb Part 2 Ubermensch Trad Rad Cath Boogaloo. Naturally some of his current fans are fuck ups because institutional power is always going to push back against chaos until it proves profitable to absorb it. But it’s not always clear who will become absorbed into the mainstream as acceptable.

I’m a careful watcher of who is considered dissident as I’ve been that chaotic kid basically since I was born. I was protected from so much of the sanding off that comes from social acculturation thanks to my parents.

But it’s almost impossible to protect oneself entirely. Much of the work of going to therapy as been about recovering the soul of that chaotic child. I hope I’ve gained the skills to protect her from being beaten down any further.