Tag: Writing

Categories
Internet Culture Reading Startups

Day 872 and Synthetic Selves

I’ve been writing in public, on and off, for my entire adult life. First it was goofy tween personal made for myself on hosted social media like Livejournal & Geocities.

My younger years were filled with sundry hosted publishers that taught you just enough HTML & JavaScript to be a foot soldier in the ISP and browser war, but never quite encouraged you to gain the more foundational tools to host yourself independent of their network effects. Closed gardens of that era gave you a small plot of digital land to tend in their giant kingdoms. I never felt like I could homestead outside of their cozy walls on my own domain.

Those plots of writing yielded fruit though. And while it feels as if I only saved a small fraction of my writing over the years, I have hundreds of thousands of words.

I do have an archive of my collegiate blog which later turned into one of the first professional fashion blogs and spawned my first startup. I’ve got 872 straight days of writing saved from this daily experiment. And while I mostly auto-delete my Tweets I’ve also downloaded the remaining archives.

Why am I mentioning my written records? Because making a synthetic version of your intellectual self that is trained through your writing is now a possibility. I’d been introduced to Andrew Huberman’s “ask me anything” chatbot that was made through Dexa.AI and I thought I’d like that but for my own writing. So any founder or LP can get a sense of who I am by asking questions at their leisure.

We’ve come so far that it is an almost quotidian project for developers if you can provide enough training data and it looks as if I may have enough. Just by tweeting my interest I was introduced to chatbase.co, ThreeSigma.ai, Authory (great way to consolidate your content) and the possibility of knocking out a langchain on Replit. Aren’t my Twitter friends cool?

A big thank you to 2021 me and 2022 me which wrote so damn much. Click those links for my “best of” round ups. Hopefully I’ll have a synthetic self soon so you will have the option of asking it instead of hyperlink rabbit holing down endless inference threads.

My buddy Sean and I landed on “Phenia” as this synth’s name. He’s tinkering already. My husband Alex is already wondering what the heck is going on. But I see a pattern emerging. Phenia as in apophenia. A synthetic self capable of pattern recognition towards an inward spiral of infinite synthetic selves? Not a bad choice for a name at all. We can figure out a chat bot in a bit.

Categories
Culture Politics Reading

Day 869 and Novelty

When I was a university student at Chicago we went through a two year core cannon which was mostly meant as a Great Books exercise. I’ve still got a dozen rainbow colored books dubbed the “Western Civilization” readers. I treasure them.

My professor was a scholar named Katy Weintraub. She was the better half of the beloved Professor Karl Weintraub. The classes were famous for good reason. I’ll forever be grateful for having been taught the western cannon by someone as capable as her.

One lesson that has stuck with me is the dangers inherent in the human urge for newness. She brought up the insidious, cumulative effects of novelty nearly every lesson.

History was driven by “newness” and its consequences. Each new historical moment was an opportunity to be reminded how fraught with the peril novel ideas and changing cultural mores could be. Death, war, famine, and conquest lurked behind an original idea.

Every rebellion, reformation, and new republic started with some asshole sharing a bright idea. And it tended to get you killed, even if your particular form of novelty got widely adopted down the road. See Christianity, various flavors of democracy, the printing press, and the Enlightenment to name a few.

The “best” part of modernity appears to be that everyone from yours truly to Donald Trump can constantly float novelty trial balloons from the comfort of their own toilet. Best and worst are doing a Janus double duty of meaning here.

Professor Weintraub might remind us that all forms of novelty are dangerous. New ideas represent change. And change is destabilizing even if we later recognize those changes as positive.

I’m certainly feeling the destabilizing effects of having to be alive during living history these days. I bet you are too. Turns out we don’t live outside of history at all. Maybe I finally understand why novelty represented such a danger in Professor Weintraub’s mind. Change has been, historically speaking, pretty hard on those living through it.

Categories
Startups

Day 840 and Do You Believe in Magic?

The glory of writing every single day is you start to build m records of your own life. You notice how much your own personal cultural history is syncretic. I’ll always be a fan of blogging because it’s got chronology at its heart. Sometimes it’s good to see how we evolved over time.

Having a written record is hard and often dangerous. You own a lot of work in progress that doesn’t necessarily reflect where you landed. And internet opposition research is fantastic at catching you in a former evolution. We call it getting cancelled. But if you get it right you have the receipts.

But if you are an honest broker of your bets you will admit when you get better and more complete information. The real magic of startups is that markets are often excellent teachers of how we are just dead wrong. And if we listen to what we are told we can adjust. And as the old saying goes the market can be irrational longer than you can be solvent. The reverse is true too.

Consensus reality is a bit magical. I called our fund chaotic because the process of getting people to align is magical but it’s chaotic as fuck. It’s studied but experimental. It relies on rules and the temerity to break them. It’s chaos magic. I wanted people to see a bit of the woo woo in our fund name every day. Technology and magic are just separated by layers of abstraction. Go read Charles Stross.

So I was overcome with delight when I saw Geoff Lewis discuss how startups are magical. An all time delightful addition to the genre of how does venture capital and startup growth even work? Fred Wilson blogged so Geoff Lewis could vlog. And he did it with verve while discussing Dungeons and Dragons stats. Also he’s team maxed charisma like me so I am inclined to like him.

The fun part is that he and I don’t really overlap except on Twitter. We’ve never discussed any of this. But our syncretic workflows had overlapped. It felt like a small ecosystem knitting moment. An alignment of metaphors and aesthetics. It made me feel damned optimistic and yes I do believe in magic. And I hope you do too.

Categories
Community Homesteading

Day 839 and Chatty

I occasionally have the ambition to be less of chatty Cathy. I almost cannot help myself in Montana. I keep meeting folks who are into the same stuff as me and then I’ll just end up talking for an hour.

Introverted Julie somehow always finds the homesteader, science fiction, alternative economy, crypto libertarian aesthetic studies semiotics pirate at the party. Sometimes it’s even the same person (hi Frank). I’ve now found not one but two homestead curious folks at a spa. The same spa! (Hi Kylie & Lorraine!)

I’ve got a general philosophy in life that you should be a beacon. We are responsible for our light and maintaining it. But are we not equally responsible for shining it into the darkness?

I’d like to see my broadcasting into the abyss of the internet as being a sort of existential lighthouse. Perhaps my chatty nature is some form of the same ambition. I want my people to find me.

And wouldn’t you know it but I’m always finding people searching for the same things. I have so many pockets of knowledge. And I want to share what I know with you. I want you to share your knowledge with me too. Your world and your experiences will add to mine just as mine adds to yours. Like the Borg but decentralized.

I’ve got a lot of weirdly specific knowledge. You know, Julie Fredrickson shit. And I want the folks who need the light I’ve cultivated to find me. So I will broadcast.

I know how to be in my body even with illness. I know about inflammation and healing from post viral shit. I know about sovereignty and survival and independence. I know a thing or two about being a doomer and an optimist.

I’ve got weirder more specifics knowledge too. Ask me about corporate governance structures and decentralized autonomous organization. Or the most cost effective luxury unbranded retinols. Or what biometrics to track and on what devices.

The point is that I’m here to be a chatty Cathy. And if you’d like to talk just slide into my DMs on Twitter. Or email me. It’s my first name dot last name at gmail. Consider this your bat signal.

Categories
Politics Preparedness

Day 808 and Left Eye

I’m literally sick to my stomach. I’ve got a twitch in my left eye. We’ve got dozens of competing factions in a massive narrative war online gunning for total social collapse and I’ve got multiple actual real live friends I care about deeply who think that THIS IS IT. Lemmings off a cliff would not be too far off as a metaphor.

There are multiple state, corporate, private entities working on a narrative collapse. Every single one of us needs to push back and say no. My only advice is to simply ignore them if you have already done basic preparations for your own life. If you haven’t it’s probably too late to do much more than treat this like a snowstorm.

Maybe Trump gets arrested. Maybe the money printer goes brrr. But you should assess your own risks as a responsible adult. Get out cash, buy some bottled water and get groceries for the week and keep calm. If it is indeed times for guns and butter the price of Bitcoin won’t matter.

I know I committed to a daily discipline of writing and I am doing it but I want to get off the internet and sleep for a thousand years. I’ll never get any work done or maintain my health and sanity if I don’t. So I am writing this and going to go about my life. You should too. And please nobody flee to El Salvador. I’ll write again tomorrow but if I’m quiet it’s because I am refusing to add any more fuel to this narrative fire.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 806 and Inputs

I’ve had a very intense month. In the past thirty days I feel like I’ve lived an entire lifetime of emotions.

I had some exciting but modestly controversial press in Vanity Fair about how chaotic the future looks in America. That brought a lot of attention and new LPs in chaotic.capital who want to invest in solutions for living in a rapidly changing future shocked world.

Then we were off to Mexico to celebrate my father’s 80th birthday and I had to grapple with complicated emotions on being present for family and the aspirations I have for a life that doesn’t align with disability.

Within a few days of getting back I had my sense making capacity crash override my brain into a snowblind. I thought I was going a little crazy but no it was because a bank collapsed. Then I heard some dog whistles about euthanizing people like me.

And finally I realized there is no point in doing my own writing in the wake of ChatGPT4 and decided that I’d do it anyways because organic human brewed content from Montana is fun to make.

It’s been an astonishing amount of inputs into my system and I am leaving out a lot of personal life details that I’ll leave folks to guess at. As exhausting as all of the above sounds it only represents a fraction of the work and emotional energy I brought to bear on expanding myself to meet this moment.

Categories
Culture Reading

Day 795 and Fabulous Fabulists

If you’ve got the gift of gab, and I do, you are probably also familiar the entire family tree of talking. And like any family, gabbers have their share of black sheep. Weaving a a yarn or telling a tall tale both come to mind.

But in order to tell a story, it’s almost impossible to avoid every form of sensationalism and embellishment. Fabulists are fabulous company. And depending on your own history with inherent knowability of truth (and it’s many sparkling facets) you may find varying degrees of fanciful details either deeply offensive or absolutely necessary. It probably boils down to your relationship with your parents honestly.

I’ve had to sing for my supper my whole life and I don’t particularly mind it’s burdens. My father was once a champion story teller and his relationship to reality was always tenuous simply because he was an eternal optimist. I’ve chosen to view this as a positive.

It is however hard to live in a culture of sensationalism. When every piece of media from memes to the paper of record is bombarding us with every angle of every story, deciding on the truth feels impossible. It’s sensational because our senses simply cannot possibly glean every facet of a situation. If you’ve ever been close to a news story I’m sure you can intuit the issue.

We’ve got an entire culture of fabulous fabulists ranging from Fox News opinion hosts to Kim Kardashian to the New York Times Editorial Board. Who you find most trustworthy in that bunch doesn’t really say much about you anymore but we sure like to pretend it does. Just remember if someone is telling you a tall tale you don’t have to believe it. But it probably helps to enjoy listening to them. And the truth is we all do.

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
Internet Culture

Day 778 and Touch Snow

I am so all typed out right now. I’ve been firing on all cylinders on text and direct message and group chats and Signal and Telegram and fuck now on WordPress.

So much shit is happening and I need to maybe get offline for a bit. Even if I’m just bringing it back down by a couple hours I think I’d be in good shape. I just literally cannot believe how much shit I wrote today.

I have had a few too many things click into place. So I am going through a bit of a level up while at the same time trying to remember to take care of myself. I am a creature that lives off the acuity of my endocrine system. So I can’t let myself get too stressed or I will literally fuck up my work.

So I will keep today brief except as a reminder that it is possible and desirable to maintain a certain stand of rhythm within your day. Because if you cannot regulate your autonomic state you’ve got no business even being in the game.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 777 and Filter

I like to say I’ve got no filter. It sounds cool to just casually admit you’ve got the balls to say whatever you like. I’m a prolific shitposter. Heck, I’m a prolific poster. Just look at the beautiful seven hundred and seventy seven day marker on this post. I write a lot.

But it’s a bit of an obfuscation to say I’ve got no filter. It’s true that I don’t self censor. I do however sift through what I’m going to say and make sure it’s appropriate for the the audience. I don’t edit necessarily (long time readers have probably noticed the numerous typos and grammatical errors), but I do think about who I am talking to when I write.

I am a big believer in meeting people where they are. Maybe it’s a function of how much time I’ve put into therapy, but I’ve become much more aware of how sometimes a person simply cannot see your point of view. Trust is fragile and we’ve not always earned a right to discuss topics that make a person upset. Through empathy you can get closer though.

Perhaps you’ve been the one with the overly emotional reaction. I’m sure you can relate to the kind of irrational reactionary feeling that comes out of nowhere. You aren’t sure why but certain people or topics or phrasings set you off. Maybe you know why. “Oh that reminds me of my overbearing mother or absent father” you might think. But as feelings are not facts, being rational can only help so much.

So I will do what I can to address the person, or in the case of social media the audience, with language and framings that work for who they are and where they are at emotionally. But I always hold onto my truth and my boundaries. Showing empathy means you can be present for someone you disagree with. And I hope everyone can see the value in that.