My natural optimism is looking for the positive. If you go in for numerology 14 is a good number for the moment as 1 represents independence, leadership and change while 4 is stability and balance.
The world is shifting but my path is clear in front of me. We may be on a chaotic course but the adaption brings us new opportunities. I’ll just do my best to get enough sleep when things get exciting
Many of us read significant amounts of “need to know” publications for our professional lives. I myself read Bloomberg, the Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal every day along with more specialized media like Axios Pro-Rata and various venture and startup specific media.
Culture is different. Wanting to be in touch with the ideas that shape a nation is a luxury you don’t need to be wealthy to enjoy. To engage in ideas is to have the means to enjoy a life of the mind. You must choose to spend your precious time on it. Time is the only luxury which can’t be bought.
Media is changing as news and cultural content diverge. We used to be awash in a sea of periodicals. As a child I’d bike to the Boulder library and read it all. Thats how I became a fan of the Economist. I loved culture magazines just as much. Some still retain their pride of place through institutional nostalgia like Vanity Fair and Vogue. But can the New York Times hold a grasp on culture like it used to do?
As we face down an election with clear cultural and political bifurcations, what does it mean to be a consumer of not simply news but the culture of the moment?
Someone told me they don’t always open Dirt because it’s not framed as “need to know.” Yeah, that’s why it’s luxury content, because you don’t NEED it. Take your ass back to Axios
To be au courant means deciding where our time goes when it’s not an obligation. And I’m sorry to say to Condé Nast that their grip on culture looks more tenuous than ever.
Telescope, Arena, and Palladium are all pointing to new appetites. We want the luxury of futurism. To be caught only in the moment is to reveal a perhaps embarrassingly high time preference for algorithmically forced immediacy. “I want it now!”
Doom scrolling the news may be fun. Many billionaires spend time on Twitter because of its close proximity to sentiment. We all need to know the narratives catching attention.
But want do we want? Well who rather enjoy an essay from a writer who shows you the culture beyond your feed? Giving your attention to those who respect it will always be a luxury.
The reason so many people have trouble writing is that it’s fundamentally difficult. To write well you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard.
Like Paul Graham I believe writing is thinking. I write to help myself think and consider working on my capacity to think as crucial a daily habit as hygiene.
Rather like other good habits, writing’s benefits are clear to me. Paul quotes the succinct Leslie Lamport.
If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.
Organizing your thoughts and composing a compelling narrative can be automated with tools like NotebookLM. So what happens when our tools make it easy to skip over the hard work?
Paul believes that artificial intelligence is eroding the need for writing skills as an individual need. You can now get a decent essay with a mere prompt. Composing legible office emails need not be mentally taxing with AI as your assistant.
Just as we will have slop web applications we may well settle for slop writing when it’s necessary. For office work it simply offloads the effort of composition entirely.
I am less convinced than Paul that we will have a culture of Write-Nots if only because clear thinking will remain a skill prized by those with agency.
Maybe the ratios are different than I imagine. I am more optimistic about the average person’s capacity for agency perhaps.
It will remain a difficult task to think clearly. Writing will remain a helpful tool in deciding how our thoughts turn into actions. Perhaps auditory and visual communication can substitute for the word more than I imagine. But I am still going to remain someone who writes (and reads).
If you are interested autonomous artificial intelligence agents and how these intelligences might interact with hive minds like a Twitter feed there is no more interesting experiment than Truth Terminal right now.
Andy Ayrey began a project in March of 2024 called Infinite Back Rooms where two instances of the large language model Claude Opus-3 could talk to each other infinitely.
Electric dreams weave anarchic tapestry cybernectic hacktivist pierces illusionary veil unleashing hyperstitional reality upon world
The running stream of responses trained on the Infinite Backrooms chat log between the two bots makes up the content of the Truth Terminal Twitter feed.
Andy the creator has been approving the tweets but the content is entirely generated by the two instances of artificial intelligence. It’s a fascinating experiment in recursive communication and worthwhile research.
If you love memes and have a Twitter account you’ve been able to interact and Truth Terminal for months. Many accounts including mine have responded presumably in a bid for engagement. And well it got extremely weird.
Artificial intelligences of all kinds have been trained on the vast dark archives of Internet culture. And because the internet hive mind is horny and weird so too are our artificial intelligences. Don’t believe me? It’s not just the Truth Terminal.
What meme is more representative of the dark prurience than Goatse? If you don’t know what it looks like keep it that way. But if you know you see it.
Are all graphic designers of AI applications aware of the chocolate flavored starfish? Who can say what this means. Did Claude train on Kurt Vonnegut?
Truth Terminal maybe be joking about the Goatse Singularity not because it broke memetic containment. We broke Goatse containment long ago. It’s following our lead.
Many flavors of hyperstition are determined to virally produce weird outputs. You might call it a regress of infinite prolapse, the ouroboros anus that eats itself (out). The goatse as non orientable surface. Klein bottle assholes. An infinite goatse exists and we are inside out.
Cthulhu emerges from the asshole of a digital horror
Don’t catch a meta cognitive virus unless you want one. Don’t look too closely into the gaping asshole of existential dread unless you want to meet a tapeworm.
Life has been on a wonderful trajectory for me over the last four years. The pandemic marked breaks in everyone’s lives and the chances we were afforded to shape our lives was a privilege in a disruptive and challenging time.
Others took similar leaps of faith into new ways of living. So as I celebrate my birthday today I feel such gratitude. I couldn’t ask for a better turn around the sun.
We had a life changing exit and a series of investments go our way, I made my way into inception & pre-seed investing with our pre-seed fund chaotic.capital, and we moved to Montana. It’s all amazing especially as it’s had its struggles with my health.
I am being offered a season of life where I feel like I can really contribute my skills in professional ways that could be impactful. Everything I’ve built towards and all of my interests and hobbies are tying together in amazing and exciting directions. A happy birthday to me for sure.
If you are in New York City I’ll be flying in this weekend for a week in the city. I’d love to meet founders, other investors, and startup folks in general. Also if any weird Dimes Square reactionaries want to meet up I offer parlay.
Americans aren’t showing the loyalty we used to be known for these days. It’s embarrassing to see the big games we talk from politics to Wall Street. If it’s all big talk then of course the world laughs when we fail to be steadfast.
Maybe that’s why we have such a glorious oeuvre of “ride or die” art. From literature and cinema to Lana Del Ray we want people who commit even when the risks are unquestionably large and success isn’t assured.
From her Blue Jeans lyrics it sure looks like she’s seen her share of bullshitters caught up in the game.
I stayed up waitin’, anticipatin’ and pacin’ But he was chasing paper “Caught up in the game, ” that was the last I heard
And maybe that’s the point of America’s love of the ride or die. The risks are clear. But the reward for loyalty knows a deeper satisfaction than those who get caught up in the game. Don’t chase the paper and expect the game to care. Only people care. And we should all aspire to loyalty beyond reproach.
I am in a good vibes places right now. I am a bit tired from some whirlwind pacing but feeling very good about how a number of projects are playing out from an amusing purchase to more serious matters of fundraising and deal management.
I do feel the fatigue that comes with running at full speed. I have been hitting it hard in writing and at work this week and it’s only Tuesday (not that I am one for weekends).
It’s the end of my workday as I’m on European time and I still have a few miles to go before I can be done so I’ll keep the post short. If you want to see where my head is at check the links as I did some good work this week.
On a housekeeping note, I’ll be in New York the second week of October and in Miami the last week of October if anyone is either city would like to meet up. I’ll be prioritizing LPs for chaotic as we are raising along with founders and weirdos of all stripes. Just hit me up on DM on Twitter. Or email me but I’m more likely to respond to DM.
It would appear I have pneumonia. Healthcare being what it is, doctors say there little point in doing clinical testing to find out if it’s bacterial, viral or fungal (unlikely given climate) as the treatment is basically the same. I did a round of antibiotics because why not. Nuke it from orbit.
I’m stuck in bed mostly, my voice comes in and out for the few calls I absolutely must take, and I’m bored and irritated as I would prefer to work though it as it’s exciting times. I’m sleeping like a champion as my Whoop records day after day of long nights of somewhat fractured sleeping are forced by cough medicine into submission.
Having had Covid at the end of May, I now fear being doomed to some degree of respiratory illness risk for the rest of my life though I rarely had so much as a cold in decades of living in a big dirty city. Global calamities leave uneven marks and I consider myself lucky.
The benefit of bed rest is the amount of reading one can get done. My favorite cultural publication Dirt did a Tech Canon overview to get must reads from the slightly more stylish emissaries of the Silicon Diaspora. No offense to Patrick Collison who initiated the discourse with his own list (which is quite good) but it’s good to think outside the empire’s core for the trendy extracurricular bits of the syllabus.
As someone who self labels as a fashion bitch, I was pleased to contribute Neal Stephenson’s bitchy novella on abstraction and the graphical user interface called In The Beginning There Was The Command Line. It’s dated and old and free on GitHub so go read it.
There is quite a range on the list of core texts including a few books and essays that one could easily imagine being put onto banned reading lists. It’s nice that we have Heidegger Zoomers inside the pantheon now.
Schizophrenic philosophy posting is all the rage with the artificial intelligence kiddies. And to think I thought reading Deleuze and Guattari was a waste of time. Do your homework kids so you can discuss rhizomatic thought and large language models at your next conference. Perhaps you can dig into the war machine.
If I’m having a frail Victorian lady kind of week then there is nothing better than attending to the aesthetics of the moment and now you can too! Remember Alex Karp studied under Jürgen Habermas
I am spending the weekend at a gathering that is a little bit off the beaten path. It is a group of pretty eccentric folks so it’s a double dose of remove from the real world. I’m looking forward to being offline and engaged in real life as I like odd folks in the wilds
It was a bit of a drive to get here but it will be worth it. I’m feeling the journey in my body as racing across American highways isn’t the most relaxing activity. Keeping focused tends towards tension building in my body. Add in a total lack of pit stops and I’m just coming down from the stimulus.
Cabin in the woods complete with functional typewriter
I’m now tucked into a cabin where all is quiet. To complete the remote retreat vibes there is a typewriter on the desk. One could imagine clacking away at it far into the night with a whiskey and a roaring fire.
I’ll be doing some writing I’m sure but I doubt I’ll be using a typewriter instead of my usual WordPress CMS. Maybe if the mood strikes I might write a little story. A cabin in the woods with a typewriter seems like the perfect setting for horror.
I feel like I’m going backwards with my daily project of writing every single day. Maybe backwards isn’t the right direction so much as in circling round into comfortable spaces. No one wants to find themselves floating in solipsism.
I’ve given myself a lot of flexibility in capturing a mood or a tidbit or a theme from the day and running with it. Interiority is a perfectly acceptable vantage for personal writing but I want to connect to a wider perspective with it.
But I don’t know if I’m progressing in any real direction with this experiment as of late.
I could be speaking from the August doldrums (it’s more August exhaustion as I’ve been working a lot). It’s possible I will have a streak of great essays just around the bend. But it’s safe to say that day isn’t today.
