I'm hiding this journal, and moving everything to X for now.

I've always been more sympathetic to the Joker than Batman.

I don't mean the violence and cruelty, we're ignoring that side of the Joker today. I mean the capacity for anarchy.

In a rough sense, the Joker is the part of your personality that says you are fine as you are. Batman is the part of you that expects more.

When I have conversations about politics, I notice that I'm more likely to take the chaotic position. What if we had fewer laws? What if we eased up on social institutions like religion or workplace culture? What if we ignore speech that we don't like? What if we let people do what they're already doing?

There are pro-chaos perspectives across the political spectrum. Americans like freedom.

When I have conversations about business, I ease up on all the chaos advocacy. It doesn't usually lead anywhere.

But plenty of voices want to play the role of Batman.

When they talk about business, they take the ordered position. What if you worked harder? Put in more hours? Removed distractions? Took care of your physical health?

This is good advice. Discipline is necessary to accomplish anything.

But life is so chaotic, there is always room to impose more order. What if you cancel Netflix? What if you stop drinking alcohol? What if you stop hanging out with friends? What if you abstain from sex outside of marriage? What if you eliminate everything that brings you joy in order to optimize for greater financial return?

I mean, there's an audience for this kind of scolding. Mostly guys, right? Guys are always willing to take some time out of their workday to hear a sermon about how they aren't working hard enough.

In the movies, Batman is also kind of a psycho. Not as bad as the Joker, but competitive.

Life is an infinite series of choices. The idea of an angel and devil on the shoulder is intuitive. The idea of just being the angel is not.

The choices give life the texture.

Entropy is worth fighting. The successes are worth celebrating.

And these two are entering the public domain in 2035, so get ready for that entire franchise to devolve into a pandemonium of competing storylines.

I'm downshifting the content on this blog, for now. I am halfway through the first draft of my new book, and I'm probably spending too much time building an audience on X. 'Building an audience' means chatting up probable bots and responding to threads on various topics with absolutely no coherent strategy.

From an SEO perspective, a regularly updated blog is a good trust-building exercise that lets Google know that your site isn't abandonware. For me, it was an intermediate step.

I first spent a few weeks typing every morning, a collection of essays that will likely never see the light of day. I moved to this blog just to get used to thinking in public, although the audience was only slightly more than one. The next step is social media and other sites that deliver content directly to the points that readers congregate. Although I'll spend more time there, keeping a repository like this blog is useful. It is similar to how comedians work through their sets in smaller clubs to prepare for the large shows.

I may change this format if I create a regular newsletter, but that's a ways off.

This post was going to be about a Naval Ravikant quote, but Skynet attacked.

It was very low stakes, as AI apocalypses go. I loaded Google Gemini, and typed 'Can you create a transcript for the following video? The transcript link is broken.'

The following text appeared onscreen:

So why don't we talk a little bit about leverage? The first tweet in the storm was a famous quote from Archimedes which was, 'Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I will move the earth.' The next tweet was, 'Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal costs of replication. Leverage is critical.' The reason I stuck in Archimedes quote in there is normally I don't like putting other people's quotes in my Twitter like that, it doesn't add any value. You can go look up those people's quotes, but this quote I had to put in there because it's just so fundamental. I read it when I was very, very young and it had a huge impression on me, and we all know what leverage is. When we use a seesaw or a lever, we understand how that works physically, but I think what our brains aren't really well evolved to comprehend is how much leverage is possible in modern society and what the newest forms of leverage are.

And then I guess the AI got more self-conscious than I am about quoting people and erased the text.

​

I'll spare you the rest of the back-and-forth. If I were more sophisticated, I could troubleshoot and describe the protocol I tripped that caused the aberrant behavior.

If I were less sophisticated, I would say that the AI is lying.

*****

I recently created an X account.

I'm not following anyone that I know in real life. Most of my friends that are still on social media hover around Facebook, and think of Elon Musk as a bad guy.

I have 31 followers. (Upped to 32 while typing this.)

I'm 90% certain that the first twenty of them are bots.

The longest conversation I had with one was a Japanese emigre to Los Angeles. She thanked me for following her, then accused me of being a bot when I didn't respond quickly enough to her messages. She sent an impossibly attractive selfie, and tried a few times to move the conversation to another app.

When I said I would be in Los Angeles the following week and offered to meet up, she said maybe. If I could download WhatsApp or Telegram, we could have coffee on the beach.

You know, like humans do.

*****

If this blog is useful for anything, a quick scan should show that I'm human. AI prompts don't combine this kind of scatterbrained detail.

I don't know how people online will prove this in the near future. Maybe when freelancers are hired, they will have to type out naughty language or bomb recipes.

The easiest way to calm fears that AI will take your job is to start using it. It will do many things better. It can't bundle these disparate actions into a cohesive package.

I don't want to focus on this topic too much. However, I talk about politics, and a lot of that hinges on a divergence in views on race, so clarifying my stance seems fair. I think I can fit all of my principles into one post.
1. Fuck the Nazis.
2. Fuck the Confederacy.
3. The two political factions listed above are largely defunct (outside of some parts of the punk scene, or fail-tier social media apps), and had distinct philosophies and agendas. Broad-brushing these movements as 'white supremacy' confuses more than it clarifies.
4. Coleman Hughes is correct that color blindness should be our North Star. (I didn't put this at number 1 as a tactic; didn't want to give leftists an excuse to stop reading right away.)
5. Politicians are forced to be racist. They must appeal to certain ethnic groups to campaign, and the policies they support would either maintain the status quo or favor some groups over others. Looking to politicians for guidance on ethics around race is a mistake.
6. What society thinks of as 'race' is mostly inaccurate labels applied to a gradient of skin tones, the byproduct of human ancestors living at various distances from the equator.
7. Loyalty to a state or country usually means giving greater weight to the flourishing of a population in a specific geographic area, which likely originates from ancestors living at various distances from the equator. Ending racism probably means, at some point, discarding the concept of geographically constrained countries. (Try not to freak out, right-wingers. Probably not in our lifetimes, and the US shouldn't go first.)
8. Attempting to discuss matters around race has created new distinctions in language. Overt racism in the US has mostly been supplanted by rancor between groups that use (or refuse to use) different phrases.
9.  Racism is ill-defined, and used to describe a variety of elements. Eliminating cruelty is a more achievable goal.

A day into this month, Intel has announced layoffs of 15,000 employees. Bungie is the latest game developer to go through a round of firings, bringing the year's total of game developers fired to well over 10,000.

If you have been to a fast food restaurant recently, you might have noticed a kiosk doing a job a human used to manage. Food service is getting off lucky though. Only 12% of the workforce is in danger of getting replaced. According to Visual Capitalist, that threat is between 19% to 46% for most industries.

I support AI and automation, but I can see that these productivity gains will be concentrated in a few hands. So many are going to be left behind.

It's a little strange that elections still aren't focused on this issue. Is it just that Andrew Yang was ahead of his time?

It might be that the opposition wasn't coherent yet. You can point to the vast debt the US is in as a counter to universal basic income, but for now, the two major parties have agreed to ignore the debt to avoid touching social security.

However, if the question is altered a bit, we aren't talking about UBI anymore, but AI. And views on AI divide society, but not along the clean partisan lines that we are used to with other issues. Democrats are more positive on AI, and more likely to support regulation. Republicans are the inverse. But it is easy to imagine a new political paradigm, where a faction that wants to lean into AI while tempering the effects with UBI opposes a group that wants to hit the brakes on everything.

For close to eight years now, politics has been too obsessed with culture war antics to really focus on a particular issue. Between a left-wing ideology that takes up a lot of mental real estate and right-wing support for some guy that devours the rest, we could only consider the handful of issues that fed the rancor.

At some point, Trump will exit the public stage. I don't even want to speculate how; his fans are out of their minds. But it will happen. Wokeness will be around longer in some form, but through a process of dialogue and persuasion, I imagine that society will slowly extract the more useful ideas and discard the rest.

I know that the current culture war seems intractable. But the future is coming fast.

Should we start with how the concepts of left and right are nonsense?

It wasn't a thing at the beginning of US politics. It happened a little later, during the French Revolution. Supporters of the king would sit to his right during the National Assembly, and the revolutionaries sat to his left. We would recognize the polarization that set this in action; they changed seats to avoid the slurs and insults of the opposition.

Let's not dwell on the French Revolution too long, it's as fascinating as a car crash.

It makes sense for a society to cleave itself into opposing camps when confronted with a truly divisive question, with only two apparent choices. It doesn't make sense when society stretches to confront more than ten disconnected divisive questions, some of which appear to have infinite solutions.

On this shaky foundation, 'centrism' might mean a variety of things, depending on context. It could be a desire for a moderate approach to one or more divisive issues, such as abortion. It could mean a mix of perspectives from the left and right; whatever quantity is needed to break loyalty to one tribe. It might be an aesthetic aversion to divisive rhetoric. It could be cover for an unpalatable or unjustifiable position (often support for Trump). It could even be an awkward desire for entertainment devoid of smug political messaging.

At best, it is an understanding that the correct path is often unclear and that vigorous debate is needed to discover the way.

If we are trying to draw a line from the French assembly to modern times, the spectrum is an indication of how comfortable one is with traditional structures of authority. Self-described centrists or independents might be loathe to throw in with one party, but they have some comfort with the existing government structure (capitalistic liberal democracy), and probably conform to popular views around religion and relationship structures. This is why, under pressure, centrists tend to veer right. (I'm referring to average voters here, not audience-captured media personalities.)

Traditional structures of authority aren't doing a direct power grab, at least not yet. The current primary objective of the right is to weaken the central government as much as possible, on the assumption that local governments, religions, businesses, and families will rush to fill in the vacuum. This is starting to break down, in response to the leftward swing of big business.

'First do no harm' is a laudable approach to politics. In polarized times, if the right doesn't plan to create new laws, and resists political expansion, well, I can see why they gain the support of the center.

If the right rejects the small government approach and slides towards theocratic nationalism, it's time for the center to bail. The way I read current Supreme Court decisions, that time has already arrived.

*****

I'm not on the left, as constituted these days, because of the bleak religious overtones. Certain words, foods, and other behaviors are forbidden. Society is stratified into a caste system of intersecting combinations of race and gender, some to be considered sacred, others scorned. Everything is broken and doomed, and the best you can do is to be open about the mental illness you are struggling with.

I'm not on the right, because the only appealing aspect it has is the critique of the left. I like freedom. Faith, family, and tradition sound boring to me. If I was walking through the woods and came across Chesterton's Fence, I would blow it up to see if it was hiding a cool secret path.

Although this stance puts me closer to the Libertarians, fully unregulated capitalism seems like a mistake. Tyranny can come at you from any direction.

And I'm not in the center, because I'm not trying to fit my entire perspective into a tweet. As you can see, I'm willing to type out 662 words to really flesh out my views.

Call me 'unaffiliated' instead. Sounds more rebellious.

Worked: Writing a Blog
This has been a fun experience so far. I know that eventually, I'll have to scale back my trend of posting every day, or I'll try tweaking the formula in other ways. Since no one else is reading this (for now), I'm just throwing spaghetti at the wall without even checking to see what sticks.

Played: The Quarry
A gory, formulaic horror movie, converted into a computer game format where you can save or kill all of the major characters. Thoroughly enjoyed it! The plot is a little overstuffed, like three different 'Cabin in the Woods' scenarios are mashed together, but everything is satisfyingly tied together at the latest possible moment. The best jokes happen when someone stubs a toe; the camp counselors have clearly had to censor themselves while surrounded by kids the past couple of months.

Of the actors I recognized, Grace Zabriskie is the only one who gets much to do. That's fine though; slasher movies are one of the few genres that can put unknown actors at the center of the action. The importance of celebrities in film financing seems inevitable now, but as productions move away from Hollywood and costs drop, it would be cool to get away from this trend.

Listened: Chappell Roan
I don't know how people listen to new music these days. As much as I love streaming services like Spotify, they are usually content to feed you what you have been listening to all your life. There's no huge omnipresent media empire dishing out new music, the way radio or MTV once did. But if you go out of your way to find new acts, you might notice that Chappell Roan is dominating attention spans.

I have a theory for why. Outside of her obvious creativity, talent, catchy production, and the like.

Her music is upbeat synthpop that echoes the 1980s without retreading the styles. Her fashion style is ostentatious, influenced by the drag queen scene. Her lyrics evoke a young, sex-positive, optimistic worldview.

She's like, the exact opposite of the bad vibes the culture has been mired in for years.

Visited: Red Dwarf (Las Vegas)
I have fun every time I visit this bar. It's sort of halfway between a punk dive and tiki bar. They have a giant twenty-sided die if you want to try a random beer and shot. And as a friend pointed out last night, the lack of gaming machines means that everyone is forced to socialize.

I used to have a profoundly gloomy outlook on climate change. Full-on multi-year existential crisis. My first thought on waking up in the morning was the death of all life on earth. I would be sitting at a party, thinking about how it was already too late.

A random internet comment changed my mind.

It was in a private group from years ago, so I can't attribute this, or get the wording right. But here's the gist:

We should always assume there will be a future. If there is, and we haven't planned for it, the opportunity cost is too great. If there isn't, we lose nothing by planning anyways.

*****

In the years since I read that, there have been some impressive innovations in clean energy. We witnessed the rapid overhaul of the world's economy at the beginning of the pandemic. There is a new technology boom based around artificial intelligence (or large language models for now).

The news around climate change seems to be getting worse, but I think that's mostly a result of social sorting. The bad news is written by those with a negative outlook, for those with a negative outlook. Good news doesn't spread and is also difficult to recognize in this field. And the partisan influence means that the sides don't easily communicate with each other.

Intelligent people tend to become snared in philosophical traps of their own creation. If you spend a few hours learning about the carbon deposits trapped in the Arctic permafrost, this could cause you to become a climate doomer. But you could also spend a few hours learning about misaligned AI, or falling birth rates, or global jihadism, and become a doomer trapped in an alternate narrative.

If your friends also believe this narrative, or worse, your paycheck depends on your faith in this narrative, you could be here your entire life.

The alternative is also scary, in a way. It is to admit that we don't know what we don't know. Committing to any narrative, even a self-destructive one, provides the comfort of certainty.

Embracing uncertainty provides a different comfort. The sense that whatever is coming, you can handle it.

*****

We are here to solve problems. It is our core purpose.

Some problems have no apparent solution, but time reveals new technologies and new paths.

Even if hope is a mistake, fatalism is a distraction.

We don't know enough to be afraid.

*****

BONUS CONTENT - Here's some miscellaneous advice on how to adapt to the future.

Although it's useful to resist a nihilistic mindset, there is still a lot to gain from communicating with people you disagree with. Every protester has some element of truth in their message. Balancing these influences is tough, but illuminating.

Give less weight to what influential people say, and more to where they invest their time and money.

Practice creativity. By creativity, I mean anything an AI assistant can't replicate.

There are several ways to create a career that is ahead of the technology curve. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is eternal.

Have a good time! The future is your new hangout.

I'm doing something a little different today. I'm journaling my thought process on which specializations I'll be writing about.

Yesterday I joined the Location Rebel Academy. I'm enjoying the course so far. Although I read a ways past this point, I'm circling back to the lesson 'How to Choose What You’re Specializing In'. I'm not going to retype the whole lesson, but if you are hung up similarly, you should be able to follow my method.

I am very resistant to the idea of nailing myself down to one niche. I even had the motto 'NICHES ARE LEASHES' on my homepage. I took it off when I thought more about who would see my page at this stage. There's nothing wrong with checking out someone's page to see what they can write. (I'll have to do it myself, to complete some networking steps later in the course.)

The first advice in the article is to find an industry, and then specialize in a niche. After this, financial services, insurance, technology, and health are listed as profitable niches.

I can cross two off the list right away. I don't believe in insurance, so I won't be able to write effectively to those who buy or sell it. I also don't enjoy writing about health. I know a little about dieting, but I outsource my workout plans to an app, and I can't even watch TV shows about doctors.

My relationship with technology is more complex. I struggle to stay awake in conversations about cars, or smartphone capabilities. But any time that technology overlaps with my core interests in business, politics, or entertainment, I'm intrigued.

Wait a sec. How did I figure out my core interests? I placed the question in the back of my mind for a few weeks. I paid attention to the media I was drawn to consume. And I asked myself what I could contribute to these spheres.

Business is obvious. Anyone who is drawn to the idea of going into business for themselves has an interest in the meta-discipline. Entrepreneurship in particular is a lucrative but crowded field. I think my political stance sets me apart. Since I come from a political tribe that is skeptical of capitalism, I know how alienating much of the space can be to this tribe. I think I am more willing to navigate that resistance, and to ignore the audience that seeks wealth while ignoring politics. This only works because I'm crazy enough to talk about both fields at the same time.

Politics is not obvious. I don't want to spend much time advocating for a party or cause. (This should be easier when Trump leaves the stage.) However, the past few years convinced me that society needs ways to communicate around political chasms. Also, the political space profoundly needs more participants who aren't outrage farmers. I'm not sure if there is much financial incentive to this approach. My theory is that I will gain the trust of a few by communicating clearly, and inadvertently angering the rest might help with traffic.

Entertainment is just a great secret sauce. It's my excuse for writing about whatever I want. It's another crowded field, but I know how to focus on obscure trends and media that haven't hit the mainstream yet.

A cool byproduct of narrowing down to these three interests is that they combine in interesting ways. I hope you're this lucky.

*****

You can tell that I write these blog posts with no outline. Here comes an awkward transition back to the lesson.

When choosing freelance jobs, you have to choose between pay and prestige. Easy enough. I wasn't planning to apply to high-competition sites or magazines anyways. Maybe a ways in the future, but it's not a personal goal.

For choosing a type of content, I might have already done this. I'm demonstrating that it is easy for me to crank out blog posts. But in the future, I would like to write scripts (for YouTube influencers and films), maybe a handful of books, and some copywriting gigs just for the filthy lucre.

Next is taking an inventory of current skills. Let's go through each of the prompt questions:

Where do you have the most experience?
I worked in transportation for twenty years, but I'm not sure how actionable the knowledge I gained is. For over a year I coordinated electrical needs at conventions, where I learned some things that could potentially save a lot of people money and frustration. I worked at the county election department in a few roles; though what I learned there isn't as valuable, the knowledge supports my interest in politics. I've learned so much recently by training AI models. And in other jobs, I picked up all kinds of things, like what door-to-door salesmen notice about a house before they knock on the door. This doesn't even touch what I have learned outside of employment, or how many podcasts I listened to during that twenty-year data entry stint.

Where do you have the most expertise?
I don't know how to answer this one, but the answers around it are strong enough that I probably don't need to.

Do you really enjoy anything on the list?
Yes. I enjoyed the creative aspect of crafting AI prompts, which I know I can divert into writing. A common thread through some of the other jobs is that I appreciated helping others navigate difficult topics.

Can this industry pay? (some industries pay better than others)
As I mentioned earlier, I have some hunches. I need to do more research.

If I had to pick one thing to write 700 words on today, what would it be?
I feel like I'm writing it now. But if I had to narrow to one industry, writing ties everything together. AI is a close second. And third, convention work likely has the most untapped potential.

The next step in the lesson, 'researching your potential ideas', will be too lengthy to include in this post. So is 'make a big list of places and people in your niche', which suggests a minimum of 100.

The last step is 'just start'. With that in mind, this is the first post I'll link to X, disordered as it is. I'm expecting my specialties to narrow a lot over time, just because writing creates the path.