An interesting task popped up on my to-do list this morning.
Not important for the story, but some may recognize that this is OmniFocus. I’ve been using it with great success for more than a decade and cannot recommend it highly enough for anyone who has to juggle between work, family, and — and this is what tipped me to using it but probably won’t apply to you — the massive amounts of paperwork needed for US immigration.
It was one year ago yesterday, then, that during a buisiness trip to California, over drinks and appetizers, I was subjected to an hour-long tirade about the evils of fiat currency and the brilliance of digital gold that is bitcoin, and why would I want to miss out on the future of finance?
This was from two friends, both half a decade or so younger than me, who hadn’t previously met but quickly found common ground in their love of decentralized finance and Tesla stock.
I held my ground and tried to explain — as well as I could after a few beers — that I wasn’t much of a gambler, and that even if I was I would rather have gambled somewhere that has free drinks and livelier entertainment. I told them to read the Incerto. One of them had the books but hadn’t gotten around to reading them, and disliked Taleb on principle. We agreed to disagree, and parted ways with this task dictated on my phone.
And here we are today.
They are both fine, or so I’ve been told, because they sold everything at just the right time. My task is therefore complete, although I didn’t have to wait a full year to check it off. The value then, after all, was the same as it is now, which is to say exactly zero.
The worst and most cancerous campaigns on the internet are not to be outreasoned or debated. Doing so grants credibility where none should exist. And Twitter has never truly come to terms with the asymmetrical dynamic.
Dangerous thing, asymmetry is.
After a 10-month hiatus I am reactivating my linkblog account on Radio3, one of Dave Winers' many great projects. It has cross-posting to Micro.blog which Just Works™️. Happy days.
November 14, 2022
In the late 1700s, America’s founding fathers had a fight over the best treatment for yellow fever, then sweeping though Philadelphia. Republicans preferred bloodletting and purges; Federalists took a more conservative approach.
If it’s any consolation, the country survived.
Still standing! And even more impressive in person.
The “new” museum, 3 years old now, is also wonderful and worth a repeat visit to Liberty Island.
And most times, it is! It doesn’t take an advanced degree in hospitality studies to figure out that most things in the family vacation gauntlet that is Pigeon Forge, Tennesse
For the uninitiated, Pigeon Forge is the closest neighbor of Gatlinburg, the gateway to the Smokey Mountains. This website helpfully lists all the “attractions” available to those who would rather not hike, most of which line both sides of the highway you need to take to get to the Smokies. It is — especially to my European eyes — quite the sight. are, indeed, tourist traps — empty flashes of light and puffs of smoke meant to relieve you of some expendable income.
But in that most lies the trouble. For a decade now we’ve driven past a gigantic banner in the Shenandoah valley advertising the Luray caverns as if they were the eight Wonder of the World. And for a decade or so I avoided going because it was clearly a tourist trap. Only, it clearly wasn’t.
So I’ll tell you a secret: we did end up going to one of the “attractions” in Pigeon Forge that’s a mini-resort of it’s own call The Island and that too was charming in a fake lego-land sort of way. Dollywood is there too, and we will go some time soon.
Between everything that’s within walking distance in D.C. and driving distance up and down the East Cost — being loose with the definition of the coast as I will count the Smokies in there too — even if 99% of attractions are pure tourist traps, the 1% can fill a lifetime.
Two caveat: first, maybe your Tourist Trap Radar is better calibrated than my own, as my frugal-by-necessity parents instilled in me the sense that anything that charges money is a tourist trap. We saw many a historic landmark — from the outside, of course — in my childhood.
Second, it may occasionally happen that you pay for something and then, as you step through the entrance, get a sinking feeling that there is no there there and that the place is indeed a tourist trap. But so what! You can’t be a good surgeon unless you’ve occasionally taken out a healthy appendix, and you can’t be sure you’ve seen everything that’s good unless you’ve occasionally visited a clunker.
I sense this advice applies to more than just general surgery and vacationing.
When all is said and done, Twitter will have been a net negative for humanity regardless of leadership.
Because it combined flat social interactions with costless message amplification, it led to too many pile-ups of tens of thousands-to-one, too much reality distortion that pushed people into doomscrolling, too deep of an insight into often anonymous but always scarred psyches which we would subconsciously mirror.
Most people remember the precise moment when they realized how dangerous these dynamics are. My own came on the night of January 3, 2021, after the public flagellation of one John Roderick, known henceforth as “Bean Dad".
Note that this is a link to an article in Forbes, of all places, which I found the most in line with my own thinking. This is how social media radicalizes you. I wasn’t exactly Robert Oppenheimer reciting from the Bhagavad Gita, but a sense of Twitter being a psycho-nuclear weapon formed, and why would I want to spend too much time around it?
And now a billionaire wants to mold Twitter into the human hive-mind, or the everything app, or a bank. To overuse an analogy: this is very much like Edward Teller — a real-life mad scientist and an overall horrible human being — proposing to use his brainchild, the hydrogen bomb, to terraform Alaska, extract oil from tar sands, and control hurricanes. There’s so much power there, don’t you just want to use it?
No. Just stop.
So it is with giddiness and delight that I follow the flourishing of
micro.blog, and wt.social, and even the overcomplicated for its own good Mastodon, and most of all what Dave Winer is doing with FeedLand, because there is an alternative timeline out there where Google never shut down the Reader and RSS is the dominant language of social networks and whatever foibles of that other world may be — the 2012–2020 Romney administration, the complete and utter dominance of webOS, mere existence of the DC cinematic universe — at least we’d have known it got on-line social interactions right.
November 11, 2022
Eleven years have passed since the 11/11/11 release of Skyrim. Tempus fugit.
November 10, 2022
The Wizards’ new cherry blossom styling is quite fitting for DC, and even more pink than this photo conveys.
