Outlandish Josh

I’m wearing this fly new hoodie I got from the artist who did that “Act Like Ya Know” poster that I liked. Rage is not revolution, but it might be a precourser.

I think it’s important to recognize that when we talk about political extremism in Estados Unidos, the far Right is much larger, organized, well funded and (critically) well armed and prepared to shed blood compared to the Left. They are a strong movement which has embraced increasingly violent and eliminationist rhetoric, especially with regards to Muslims in the wake of 9/11.

It’s been years since eco-radicals even burned down a lumber-yard — which is ultimately just property crime — but anti-choice radicals still kill doctors and “militia” members (or anti-tax hardliners) blow up buildings in protest of what they perceive to be tyranny.

The political right has been fueled by fear and anger for decades. The chickens are coming home to roost.

I twittered about this, and posted a video in my last post, but I have to say I’m just blown away by the latest release from The Kleptones. These guys are the shit. They evolved from making ultra-clever — and still totally listenable — album-based mashups (Yoshimi Battles the Hip Hop Robots and A Night at the Hip-Hopera, which will make your head asplode with Queen+KRS) and have moved fully into the realm of Art.

I’ve listened to Uptime/Downtime several times though, and it takes the more free-form explorations of the 24-hours double-album to the next level. Plus they’re using the dirty beats now too. It’s just great to see post-postmodernism at work.

People of PDX and SF can unlock the magic LIVE this weekend…

Live fast, die old.

So I feel the need to expand on my previous posts expressing some pessimistic thoughts and doubts about humanity. I got some reactions from people, which means I touched a nerve, which is good, but I want to express an underlying opinion.

I’ve often hit on the twitter-thought above from dustincurrie. Life is fundamentally an anti-entropic force. At the universe-level, thermodynamics still wins (we think), but at any other scale, any scale that actually matters to us, what makes Life Life (and in some ways People People) is that we build things. We assemble, compile, amalgamate, reconfigure. We create complexity from the soup, whether it’s protoplasmic algae pulling carbon out of the air and combining it with solar radiation to create hydrocarbons or the global human-hive that’s currently doing an unplanned terraforming exercise on the whole planet. We’re unique like that, and this is pretty special.

Life is Holy and Every Moment Precious.

This isn’t a scientific or rational belief. It’s fundamentally a romantic one, but I also think it’s pragmatic. I believe that our lived experience comes from a combination of fantasies and reality, neither of which we can really address directly or independently. However, we can sometimes choose (or at least slowly steer) our fantasy, which adjusts the possible and helps us have a different experience, which ultimately leads to different outcomes, which impacts reality. Lather, rinse, recurse, and you have my basic theory of social change through culture.

Yes, our current all-channels communication explosion may practically amount to networking while Rome burns. However, if we want an alternative to violently addressing the problems through infrastructure sabotage (specifically long-haul coal transport via rail), which I think we do, I think our new networked reality is the best basic chance we have to Get it Together and also to Deal With The Shit that’s already in the pipeline.

People may be disappointing creatures, but we’re all we’ve got, and all we’ve got is right now. Might as well try to make it work.

The real problem is that I don’t get along with a lot of tech people. It reminds me of how when I was in acting school I found I didn’t like many actors. Here I am in a space, a culture, a zone where I seem to be getting some traction, and I’m increasingly frustrated with my nominal peers.

In particular I find the crossover between geeks, hipsters and entrepreneurs — a flavor that runs strong in SF — to be especially nettlesome. There’s a kind of passive-aggressive form of snobbish competition which emerges around these kinds of people, a sort of nerd machismo. I don’t really have time in my life to contend with machismo, and the un-manly brand is just annoying.

Cue the record-scratch sound effect. There’s an undeniably enormous element of “I am the things I hate about other people” at work here. I’m a geek, entrepreneur, hipsterish in style, and possessed of my own stinky brand of macho bullshit. The opinion-piece colliery to thinly-veiled autobiographical content is perhaps thinly-veiled self-loathing?

Maybe, but there’s also something particular to my structural-hole-bridging personality that I think prevents me from really clicking into a truly deep groove with any given set of people. My persona is playing twister with the universe, and I’ve always got a food or a hand on some other dot. Never all at home.

It’s an old gripe. There’s not much I can do about this but live through it, to keep transcending whatever games I can. Noticing things one hates about oneself in others is a growing moment once you realize that’s what’s going on, and opportunities are created every time I can see my way past one of these things, to a higher purpose or more integrated whole. This is where you level up as a person, I think.

I am my own man, which is a vastly privileged thing to be. I have, as they say, First World Problems. And although I know I am not like other people in my circumstances, and probably not in my composition, I believe at a core level that I could be anyone, and everyone could be me. Not literally, but situationally. I think we can all be “our own people”, and the world would keep on churning, maybe quite a bit for the better, if we were.

Which makes it particularly jarring when I’m forced to the realization that all this internet goodness isn’t changing human nature, or at least if it is, it is evolving us more even slowly than a W3C spec (cue rimshot). People are still largely the same: shallow, scared, narrowly self-interested: very much not their own people. We may be moving gradually towards a brighter future, but in the mean-time I’m confronting the very things I hope to change manifesting themselves in the very space that I thought would be home base for said changing. That’s a mouthful, but hopefully you catch my drift. It’s a bummer, man.

I don’t subscribe to the notion that people are inherently anything more complex that social pattern recognizers who like to be well fed, safe, sexually satisfied, and part of a community. Beyond that — and even sometimes in the face of that — we are what we believe, what we learn from observation and emulation, what we come to know in the spaces between us and others.

Human nature, such as we reference it, can change. It can change in pretty big ways and with impressive relative speed compared to, say, geology or genetics. Specifically, as soon as we gain insight into ourselves, our selves themselves are changed; a sort of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle of the psyche. It’s one of the reasons I don’t find those “simulation theories“ very philosophically interesting. Epistemology often comes down to pretty basic decisions — what do you believe — and I fundamentally don’t subscribe to a mechanistic/deterministic model for humanity. We’re an organic, emergent phenomena, and thus a constantly moving target. We can’t simulate ourselves accurately because if we did we wouldn’t be us.

And so one can argue that the generation coming up and the generation that’s gotten on board with the internet thing have evolved in fundamental ways. Our assumptions about communication and geography are different, as are our understanding about how knowledge and truth are obtained. I think these shifts are more or less for the better, but in and of themselves they don’t seem to have led to very different behaviors other than the phenomena of internet usage in and of itself. We retain the same patterns of action otherwise; a politics dictated by an elite class of of insiders and talking heads, a social milieu defined by those who are in and those who are out, an economics that is on the way to creating a permanent generational underclass. All of these things should and could be changing, but they aren’t. At least not yet.

Under such circumstances, one can begin questioning the strength of one’s small-d democratic beliefs. I can idealize a world of egalitarian brotherhood and harmony among peoples, but what if peoples themselves aren’t so into it? What if they prefer starfucking, holy wars and reality television?

As an upper-middle-class college-educated straight white male, it’s hardly my place to judge anyone, but it would be really cool to see something unexpected in the next year or so. I’m always optimistic and constantly hopeful.

My first blush with the festival gave me The Fear. There’s a huge amount of visual noise. Brands, bands, posters, pasties, people in suits, people in costumes, people looking lost, desperate, hungry, hung-over. People in lines. People cutting lines. People talking about how it used to be.

It makes me question a lot of my basic assumptions about the Goodness of what I do for a living. The revolution hasn’t changed human nature, and it’s unpleasant to see how sheepie we beings can still be. As the man says, I am the things I hate about other people.

On the other hand, some dudes made a massive Tesla coil that can play music.

My talk was well received I think, and now I’m just wandering and soaking it up. There’s a lot of good stuff here, now that I’ve gotten over my initial culture shock. Austin is beautiful and warm, and there are lots and lots of happy smart brilliant buzzing people around. I’m going to enjoy my sunday.

Assuming the weather doesn’t totally screw me, I’m headed to Texas for SXSW interactive. You can check my song and dance on yr schedule. I’m gonna do 70 slides in about 35 minutes, so it should be good.

I expect I’ll get all caught up in the digital excitement, so probably plenty of twitters and the like.

And BBQ.

Hippy music, please:

One of my most important original philosophical catchphrases is “The Most Important Thing Is To Stop Struggling.” It’s something I remind myself of frequently as my career goes through its whips twists and turns. Sometimes you find yourself in one of those situations where everything seems hard, impossible to begin on, just overwhelming. Sort of like being waist-deep in rubble.

Often the short term answer is to roll up your sleeves and dig out, because this is sometimes a devastatingly effective cheap psychological trick. That pile of dirty dishes never takes as long as it feels like it’ll take, for instance.

But, then there are the times where you feel constantly like you’re getting reset to that buried state, where you’re beating your head against the wall, doing the Sisyphus shuffle. When you notice that, it’s time to take a breath, look around, and see where/how/when to move laterally. Because as much as life is unfair, and full of adversity and strife and honest-to-goodness challenges, it’s also supposed to be — like the CSNY song there — sort of Easy.

And I don’t mean that in a lazing-about-in-the-sun sort of way, I mean it in the way that people talk about spreading a gospel. I can’t site chapter or verse, but there’s some bit I remember reading about how debating a strident non-believer isn’t a good use of time, because when you’ve got The Word you just need to find someone else who’s ready to hear it.

That’s a meta-lesson I take to heart, because really the whole premise of what I’m doing with my life and my company is a kind of gospel. We basically believe there are good ways to use open tools to make it easy, inexpensive and effective for millions of people to put their thoughts on the internet in ways they can personally own and control. We believe that by lining up all the right tools and making them easy and clear to use, we can radically lower barriers to entry in what is still an Emergent global conversation.

Speaking of old hippies, this idea has some roots for me in this passage:

Now I want to get into the idea of what is it about truth that makes truth important, cause there’s something about truth that’s really special … So, think what is truth, and what is it that we’re doing here, and what is it about being a man … like, one of the things about a man is that a man is the only animal that has a choice to make about truth. See, a cat doesn’t lie to you … you know, if cats like your vibes they crawl right up on you. If they don’t like your vibes, they’re not too hot for you. Right? The thing about truth is … God is I think trying to communicate with himself … And he has, on this here planet, about three and a half billion transceivers walking around, babbling to each other, constantly, trying to carry the circuit load for that incredible conversation that’s going on, of God talking to himself. See? And so there’s something that’s trying to be said too … right, and so we have to talk and we gotta listen when we talk as well as when we listen, in order to discover what it is that’s being said around here.

There’s a fundamental belief we carry that if we can open up enough channels and manage the flow, things will work out ok. That’s why it’s important to get people routed around firewalls in Dubai, because only with a greater ability to exchange information will we move, as a species, beyond the petty bullshit that’s tearing us apart.

Because it’s only through individual impulses, millions of honestly aligned little free-will seekers, that things actually get done. You can’t give people freedom or equality. Those are things that need to be taken. All we can do is make the most of our ability to coordinate, to learn, to align, to act, and to do all this in the common knowledge of a universal fraternity (the French kind, not Greek).

This is happening.

And when you’re delivering on the path to that kind of future, it may be hard fucking work, but it’s also easy. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter, as the poet says. And if it’s not easy, ask yourself why. Did you lose the script, or are you missing the easy way forward?

More music please:

This is a top-40 hit at the moment, and in heavy rotation (obviously) back out there in Nueva Jol. The video is a little ridiculous, but I challenge you not to let that chorus stick somewhere in your brain. You just gotta give it up for Jay-Z. He’s been cranking out anthems for the better part of twenty years now. I remember when I first landed at NYU you couldn’t walk fifteen feet without his hard knock life chorus ringing out from a car passing by. It wouldn’t be the city without him.

I arrived back in San Francisco Tuesday morning having caught up on a little rest (better sleeping through chemistry) and in time for a pretty big pitch meeting followed by a couple long days in the office. Drove up the 101 Wednesday night, fueled by mate and hope and glimpses of stars, really dropping the hammer north of Willits and making the whole run in just about five hours.

Best moment was that stretch between Laytonville and Legget where the road opens up to three lanes to accommodate slow truckers and you get that huge vista of the eel river canyon just packed with great old trees; moon was just starting to rise up behind me and at that point I was up above the fog level, nobody else on the road. Rolled down the window and let the world in; pure north coast magic.

I’ve been starting to notice all the things I’m going to miss about this place. Not just all the wonderful people, but the little things like the view out the kitchen window, the bustle of the old lady bartenders at Everett’s.

But it’s back out into the world for me. If I’m good and lucky, I’ll always have a place here, a toe on some of the best the ground in America, but it’s completely undeniable that my destiny is in some more densely populated space. The future is still uncertain there, but my latest trip back east made a very strong case for stepping up to the eternal challenge that city represents.

And so I’ll take these last months as a blessing. Most beautiful things are at least in some ways ephemeral. Knowing I’ll fly away increases the appreciation, and maybe that means my late days here will be the best yet. Sure hope so.

Music Please.

Looking out over the man-made mountains of Manhattan, full moon reflected off concrete, the lingering bite of snow in the air, wrapped up in shadows out on the fringe of exhaustion, pushing finally to the borderline of innocence past all the complications and angles; there’s where you find the essence of your reality, where control and construction fall away, where you are overtaken by events, have no choice but to Be There, suffering your nerves, grinding your jaw, feeling your guts churn, your heart about to leap or sink or smolder or burn.

And even though this can be at times quite unpleasant, the greater way is to ride these waves, breathe deeper into the butterflied tummy, the tensed-up shoulders; to channel all this energy, to let it all flow, to have the essence of original cool, neither loosing or asserting control. Because this is your life, and it’s not really something that should be rationalized. It’s something you aught to live, deeply if at all possible.

A pretty smart and pretty passionate (and it should be said, pretty pretty) woman I know explained to me once how getting out on a long road trip was a good way for her of “hitting the reset button,” getting re-acquainted with what’s important, real, true, etc. I know the feeling, but unfortunately don’t have a personally reliable formula for getting there myself. So it’s blessed when I’m transported thus, smack dab back to the moment.

It’s not really like turning your mind off so to speak — just drink five shots of whiskey if that’s what you’re after; gets boring, don’t it? — but more like getting your brain to take its foot off the brake. Scary, yes, but scary good, or to be more specific scary in the only way that anything will ever matter.

The cliches run faster than I can parry here — fortune favors the bold, risk is our business, etc — but it’s a lucky day in Koenigville. I feel closer to the truth for a change. Worn thin and frankly a little cranky from plane-sleep and whatnot, but charged up in a deeper more soulful place, with an energy I hope will last in the weeks and months to come.

Just another great weekend in NYC. Got to see some new and unexpected vistas last night — midtown was magical, much as hipsters might malign; rotating bars, passionate opinions, scintillating intellects and wide-open honest folk. There are so many overlapping worlds here, and joy to be had in unexpected quantity.

So now to wrap things up, some NYU-area wandering and hearty food in the East Village, and hopefully a preview/demo of my mom’s big presentation. I wish I could stay and play for longer — “stay a while. stay forever“ — but I’m down to my last day and nights. Strong competition for my future though, I think.