What in the fresh hell is going on on the internet these days? Ever since Trump was elected I have begun paying attention to organized anti-fascists. One of the groups I follow is It’s Going Down. They’re great. One of the things they do is pay attention to the machinations of the alt-right, including people like Richard Spencer, which I am broadly speaking happy to not do, unless he gets punched. Then I enjoy watching videos of him getting punched in the face set to all kinds of music. Great stuff.

Today they posted these tweets:

"The Yang thing is coming from a place of despair." -Richard Spencer

— It's Going Down (@IGD_News) March 16, 2019

What they’re talking about is the #YangGang hashtag movement in which anon memers, previously who appeared to support Trump en masse are defecting to Democratic 2020 candidate Andrew Yang because of his advocacy for a $1000 a month Universal Basic Income. As many of these folks self-classify as NEETs (Not in Education Employment or Training) they see his promise of UBI as very appealing.

On one level we shouldn’t over interpret the absolutely absurdist nihilistic viewpoint of this community and the fact that they seem to be willing to embrace almost any ideology (including fascism, racism and murder) as an ironic joke posture. On the other hand I feel that this reveals something about the current political moment. The reason many people were willing to embrace the madness of Trump was that they were coming from a mentality of fear and despair. Yes racism, sexism and general bigotry were a large part of it, but people were vulnerable to the ideology because of the extreme moment we are living in. Now that Trump is collapsing and failing spectacularly (although of course still dangerous) many in this strange group are rejecting him and moving to basically the opposite pole of the political spectrum, embracing a Democratic person of color who is proposing a much more socialist form of national organization than even the self described democratic socialists are proposing.

In this sense, the defeat of Clinton and the rupture in the political system that Trump represents is a crisis, but also an opportunity. All the norms and received conventional wisdom are being shredded, both for evil but potentially also for good. A robust and focused leftist movement is emerging lead by Sanders, AOC, Omar, Warren and Tlaib, and strange shifts are happening on the radical fringes as well. I would never propose that leftists form a coalition with the alt-right to support Universal Basic Income, but I think their chaotic and unilateral changing of sides is a strange and interesting sign of the overall landscape.

It’s worth noting that my posting the memes here is not an endorsement of this group or movement, it’s intended as documentation and evidence of this weird phenonmenon.

Computer games are something of an aberration in the history of games in that they are not communal property and are instead the intellectual property of a company. This is contrast to games like Chess, which is owned by no one and evolved through a process of community consensus on the rules before stabilizing in it’s current form. With the advocate of internet networked games and the modding scene, we’ve moved back in the other direction to a degree. Amateur and hobbyist game designers can play with the existing assets and systems of published games in order to create game variants which can in turn branch off into entirely new communities and games. These games can then be appropriated by shrewd companies like Valve and turned back into owned intellectual property. There’s an interesting connection to be made here to the way that scientific value is often created by publicly funded research and then appropriated and exploited by private capitalist entities. Yannis Varoufakis (who interestingly enough worked for Valve as an economist for a period) has spoken eloquently about this process, as has Noam Chomsky who has seen it first hand, given that he teaches at MIT.

I’ve written a bit about Dota 2 before and so won’t describe it at length here but it is in my opinion one of the most mechanically rich and interesting video games in existence. I’ve played about 2000 hours of it at this point. I still play it when I am largely uninterested with other video games, it’s almost endlessly interesting to me given the complexity and permutations possible within a match. It arose through the online modding scene, originally starting as a custom game mode for Warcraft 3, created by Blizzard. It attracted a community and the rules and mechanics were added to and developed over time by an unpaid group of volunteers. Eventually Valve swooped in and hired one of the prominent contributors IceFrog and created their own commercial version of it called Dota 2. Massively profitable game League of Legends is also a product of this process. Therefore two of the very most popular games in the world arose through this process of community members creating variations on games and private companies appropriating that work.

The latest popular new variant is a strange game called Dota Auto Chess. It is drawing a following and is promoted within the Dota 2 game client application, which is how I discovered it. It uses the same characters and assets (art, sound effects, animations) as Dota 2 but deploys them to make a weird low input turn based game in which you pick which pieces to buy and then let them automatically fight one another. It’s all about buying the right pieces and combining them together to make them more powerful, but completely eschews direct control, you basically buy stuff and then watch what happens. It’s compelling and I’ve started to play a bit and from looking at the community I can guess that it will continue to grow in popularity and maybe become a thing on it’s own. Valve has been smart in allowing the further creation of custom game modes in Dota 2, supporting the ongoing fermentation of game design within the ecosystem. The question is what will happen next? Will Valve find a way to keep Dota Auto Chess on it’s platform where they can capture most of the value and players? Will the developers of Auto Chess drop the Dota component and split off? Valve has a partial solution in the creation of the Steam Marketplace. If they could create a way for these kind of variant designers to earn income from their creations, they could continue to perpetuate their lock-in effects and prosper. The failure of their earlier attempts to launch paid mod support on Steam suggests they have considered this. Dota Auto Chess is an interesting case study as it grows more popular to see what will happen.

Workism is a wonderful term to describe the current religious attitude toward work and career as a site of meaning which many in our society, particularly the younger generation, subscribe to. We have been conditioned by capitalist culture to believe that not only should our working hours pay our bills and feed us but also leave us with feelings of deep spiritual fulfillment and most importantly of having “changed the world”. This is of course a poisonous prescription because the overwhelmingly vast majority of available work does not do these things, trapping people between a metaphysical rock and hard place. Hating your job does not just mean that capitalism sucks, it means that you are an existential failure and your life is without meaning. It’s small wonder we are on the brink of a revolution.

This piece by Derek Thompson for The Atlantic offers some cogent thoughts on this topic, including how as our society has grown less drawn to religion as a central source of meaning in life, capitalism has colonized this sphere as well, placing work above all else and occupying not only our struggle for subsistence, but our hearts and minds as well. He writes:

” One of the benefits of being an observant Christian, Muslim, or Zoroastrian is that these God-fearing worshippers put their faith in an intangible and unfalsifiable force of goodness. But work is tangible, and success is often falsified. To make either the centerpiece of one’s life is to place one’s esteem in the mercurial hands of the market. To be a workist is to worship a god with firing power. ”

– Derek Thompson

One of the major utilities of religion as a source of social control and thereby stability is that it is difficult to disprove. People desperately want meaning, and will accept all kinds of misbehavior as long as it preserves the narrative that their lives are meaningful and that they are part of an ordered and fair universe. Capitalism with it’s wild gyrations, crashes and scorched earth tactics is constantly and vividly confronting us with evidence of the misery it causes. It’s only through constant propaganda and conditioning that we are made to believe that if only we “hustled harder” then we too would be not only rich, but happy and fulfilled. This is a system which is built upon a foundation of misery for the many and happiness for the few, sustained through myths of meritocracy, social mobility and the myth that we could all become enlightened robber barons like Mark Zuckerberg someday.

The downshifting movement on the other hand displaces work from the central focus of our lives and instead asks us to consider potentially how little we need to sustain ourselves and to then imagine what we would do if we stepped off the hamster wheel. It envisions a life in which we are freed from the frenetic and desperate search for meaning which generates a profit and instead asks us to re-imagine what it means to be a human first and an economic actor last. This is potentially the most serious threat to the capitalist order, a denial of participation attack by a generation which has had a culture of consumption weaponized against them. There are many, many knock on effects of this which threaten the current ruling class. For one, when we lift the boot of debt and wage-slave misery from the neck of the 99% they begin to look around for other meaningful activities, like political organizing, regenerative ecology and community building. None of these practices are in the interest of the current system, and in fact serve to directly erode it. When the feedback loop starts, the dam can break quickly, as we saw with the collapse of the seemingly mighty Soviet Union. The collapse of the America-led global capitalist hegemony may come similarly quickly if enough people wake up and realize how directly against their interests it in fact is.

This piece by Detroit Techno producer Omar S is one of my favorite discoveries by him recently. It combines the focused minimalism and emphasis on textural evolution of some of my favorite techno with a wonderful sense of melody and atmosphere. Omar S, generally, is great and I love his music. I could just turn this post into a big block YouTube embeds, but I won’t out of some misguided sense of self-discipline.

The early aesthetics of house were raw and unadorned, almost ugly in their synthetic, underproduced nature, in contrast to Disco of the time which was sleek, slick and sexy. House was very gay, very black and generally not signifying as ‘sophisticated’. Techno had slightly different parameters given it’s self-conscious afro-futurism. Of course the boundaries between the two are permeable and not worth policing. Omar S music maintains the directness of early house and techno in his music while still managing to transport us to incredible, and importantly, emotional places. While so much modern and European influenced house and techno has undergone a seemingly endless process of becoming sleek and slick, there are still soulful signals emanating from the black, American birthplace of the music.

This balance of rawness and adornment has been something I’ve wrestled with mightily in my own musical output. It is not easy to make something as minimal as Omar S that works and still transmits the feeling. It’s a unique and specific skill and one of the skills I respect most in musical production. In my opinion it’s really easy to just layer and layer and layer elements, bells, and whistles to create a feeling of ‘fullness’ in a piece, but often the result is a kind of simulacra of impact. Omar S transmits incredible feeling with straightforward drum machine tracks and the bare minimum of textural variation and harmonic elements. I find his music beautiful and deeply affecting.

Welcome back dear readers. Due to a combination of disorganization and unfamiliarity with how German utilities work, I managed to get the electricity turned off in my apartment here in Berlin for two days. No heat, hot water, lights or internet. I ate in restaurants and worked during the day in a cafe. When it got dark however, I came back to my apartment and basically went to sleep. My kids were with me and so we took some night walks and bought flashlights and did shadow puppets. Luckily for me the lights were not off due to a lack of funds but just garden variety incompetence. I got them turned back on this morning.

This minor inconvenience felt surprisingly disruptive! I am reminded how much of our life is repetitive and on-rails, coasting from one moment to the next. When the life support systems are disrupted suddenly we wake up to the possibilities of reality. I am reminded that I am grateful to have electricity heat and internet and the ability to pay for it. This brings to mind the stoic philosopher Seneca’s practice of negative visualization and voluntary discomfort. Seneca writes:

‘Remember that all we have is “on loan” from Fortune, which can reclaim it without our permission—indeed, without even advance notice. Thus, we should love all our dear ones, but always with the thought that we have no promise that we may keep them forever—nay, no promise even that we may keep them for long.’
– Seneca

There is a very a great deal in common between the Buddhist embrace of impermanence and the stoic philosophy. All of current reality is conditional and arising only under certain dependencies. Conditions inevitably will change and we may not have a say in the matter. There is something about our minds which tends or wants to believe that the current conditions, vividly real and in front of us as they are, are more likely to persist then not. Of course if we understand probability we know that flipping a coin 49 times heads in a row does not make the 50th flip any more or less likely. Being prepared to embrace change when it happens may make us less likely to be paralyzed or traumatized when it occurs. For myself, I feel a renewed sense of gratitude to be able to do basics like laundry, dishes, and write this blog post.

A thread came up on Twitter about understanding personal finance for kids who grew up in poor families. The fundamentals essentially. I did not grow up in a poor family (at all) but I did grow up in a family where money wasn’t discussed or particularly well understood. My father I think had a pretty negative and stressful relationship with money for a large part of his life, particularly with taxes. My mother was shrewder. So I have sought to understand these things a bit better myself and at the very least have an active relationship with them. My goal is to make money something I have agency over and take actions and make decisions about, and not something which happens to me in a stressful way. I am absolutely not a financial expert at all (at all!) but can share a few key ideas I’ve learned as starting points for your own research. I find that teaching something not too long after you yourself were a beginner can be very effective (it’s basically what I do at my job). So I’ll fire off a few rapid, short, stubby thoughts and then you can use those as a starting point to learn more. Importantly, I am not rich, retired or even in particularly great financial shape, but I have done some reading and have an understanding of the basics and a plan which I feel good about.

Serious question: are there resources that exist for former poor kids that explain things like "this is a stock and this is what you do with it?" Do people just know this stuff? Do they learn it from their parents? Literally how

— Ian Coldwater 👻🌿✨ (@IanColdwater) February 14, 2019

0) If you have debt, get out of it as fast as you can. Easier said than done I know. I like Dave Ramsey’s baby-steps or ‘debt snowball’ approach which is all about getting motivation and momentum to pay off any debts you have before you can start saving and investing. Saving and investing does not make sense until you have cleared your debt. It’s worth noting that Dave Ramsey is an evangelical republican so I don’t endorse his politics, but his debt and money advice is good and his podcast show is entertaining and informative. I find it interesting to sometimes listen to people I don’t agree with, I know not everyone is like this so YMMV.

1) Investing and money is understandable, and not that complicated. There is a big vested interest in making you think that money is complicated and that you need super smart people to basically handle it for you. This is, predictably, not in your best interest.

2) To this end, you should have LESS people working on your money, but not necessarily zero.

3) Having a good accountant who understands your basic finances is very good and usually can be deducted from your taxes (in the US). This means it’s basically free. If you have access to the few hundred dollars needed to pay for this, it will almost definitely make you a good chunk of your income back via a refund.

4) DO NOT USE FINANCIAL ADVISORS. This is maybe surprising, but important. Just like doctors sometimes get bribed to sell you medicines, most financial advisors actually make money by actively doing stuff with your money that is not needed, selling you things you don’t need, and so on. If you must have a financial advisor, get someone who is what’s called a ‘fiduciary’. They take a fee, not a percentage and don’t sell you financial products.

5) DO use index funds. Index funds basically are a random sample platter of the stock market. Instead of trying to pick winners and losers, they get a little bit of everything. The whole market goes up, you make money. Historically, the whole market has been going up for about 100 years. Unless we see an apocalypse (which I think is totally possible, but still) this is a good bet. It is a good bet based on the last 100 years anyway.

6) DO use robo-advisors. These are things like Vanguard and Wealthfront. It’s basically an automated system that sticks your money into index funds for you and just lets it sit there while doing some minor tax-harvesting and balancing automatically. The most important aspect of these is LOW FEES. They do not need to pay a person to do lots of useless expensive stuff with your money, so they don’t. It just sits there and slowly increases in value, which is what you want. The low fees part is the most important aspect of this. Also it’s SUPER EASY.

7) Understand the concept of Compound Interest. This is a mathematical principle which basically means, if you put your money in something which earns interest, and don’t touch it, you will earn interest on the interest. At the beginning this process is slow, but later it goes faster and faster, like a snowball. By the time it’s time to retire, you can have turned a small amount into a lot (like, really a super lot if you start early and go steadily).

8) Start as early as you can. Because of compounding, time is actually more important than the amount you save. It’s weird but true. So try to get this started soon, even if it’s very small amounts initially. It also feels good to get started and have a plan in place.

9) Finally, don’t stress about being perfect or getting it exactly right. The basic idea is just: save some money and put it somewhere will it will grow bigger. Doing a little is better than nothing and time is your friend if you start early. If you haven’t started early, start now.

For some books on this stuff I like Your Money Or Your Life, Early Retirement Extreme and Money: Master The Game. Different books will appeal to different people of course, so your mileage may vary.

And finally, I am aware that for the amount that I write about the need to collapse capitalism that this may feel a little schizophrenic. But I also believe that understanding money and basic financial literacy in the context of the current system should not be the exclusive property of social reactionaries and robber barons. But I recognize it’s a bit of a weird mix. I think it’s important to embrace these contradictions and be open about all the stuff I’m thinking about. This is definitely part of it! As one of my favorite writers Zahira Kelly often says “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.” And capitalism is the environment we exist in, so we all need to survive until the advent of fully automated luxury space communism.

Naomi Wu is an interesting lady. She’s smart, opinionated and a talented maker. She is from Shenzhen, China and creates and documents a lot of interesting and unconventional hardware products. The video above is a perfect example, a self-made strobing light source that illuminates her breast implants. She has a ton of great content online but I picked this one because it sits at the intersection of sex and DIY technology which is one of the things which makes her unique. Her presentation is overtly sexualized in a way that traditionally is deployed in misogynistic and male dominated contexts, but she is subverting these tropes by juxtaposing them with open source hardware hacking and maker culture. And she is doing it in a very direct and even confrontational way, she is not trying to blend in with the guys, it’s front and center, in her name and the persona she portrays.

I understand that there will be people who will find this distasteful, which is of course their right. But I think that as members of nerd subcultures it is important for us to create an inclusive and welcoming space for people with every kind of presentation and mode of expression. There is a power differential in our world between those who can fluently use and edit technology, both hardware and software, and those who cannot. By culture-policing tech broadly as a space in which only people who look a certain way or are a certain gender, or are not too sexual, or don’t make people nervous, we enforce that dynamic. Naomi is aggressively asserting her femaleness, and an aspect of female influence and power through her sexuality, in a male dominated space. She’s not blending in or making herself small. I think it’s important that we make sure that we support and create space for people like her as we seek to transform the bro-space of tech.

Fat guys and girls stand up for me every. single. day. Same shit- look at the work, them being online is not permission to judge or give an unrequested opinion on how people look. https://t.co/hd7UXsGf1Z— Naomi Wu 机械妖姬 (@RealSexyCyborg) January 31, 2019

This exchange occurred on Twitter where Naomi stood up to comment against someone mocking the stereotypically nerdy appearance of a famous Wikipedia contributor. One of the things I love about the tech space in contrast to the music world is that it is less superficial and image oriented. If you are smart and talented, the way you look matters less. That’s not to say it doesn’t matter at all, because if you show up as an outlier along some other vector, like Naomi, that prejudice can still exist. In my ideal nerd world we can all be judged on our skills and what we bring to the table in terms of ideas, not whether we wear a short skirt or have flashing boobs.

Bonus! This looks like a really fun recipe that I want to try from her channel:

I’ve been really enjoying lately the commentary of Anand Giridharadas, particularly his thoughts on billionaire philanthropy. To quote and possibly paraphrase the wise Ricardo Semler, if you’re a billionaire and feel the need to give back, you probably took too much in the first place. There’s an open question right now, whether the billionaire ruling class still feels vulnerable to popular revolt, or whether they feel they’ve consolidated power enough to simply pull up the draw bridge. The actions of the most prominent billionaire philanthropists suggest they recognize that it is not in their interests to be seen as as nakedly greedy and power hungry as they in fact are.

This brings us to the fig-leaf of philanthropy. The rich believe, given their massive success in private industry, that they are more wise and effective than governments, and therefore should be allowed themselves to administer how their largesse is distributed. This is of course an idea which is absolutely core to Republican and global conservative ideology. The state should not tell us how to distribute charity, we will do it ourselves. Of course we need to look no further than the American president’s personal charity to see how well that works, in which he essentially used it as a money laundering vehicle and spent the charity’s funds on purchases of ugly paintings of himself.

If we look to the Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world we find a less nakedly corrupt model, but one in which we find tremendous power consolidated in the hands of a very small and most importantly completely unaccountable group. No one is forcing their charities to make sure that ALL children have access to the charter schools they fund or that they also extend their philanthropic medical care to politically unpopular groups like black trans sex workers. This is of course why the rich resist taxation with all the powers at their disposal, and advocate instead for voluntary private philanthropy. Philanthropy is voluntary and can be immediately withdrawn the moment it threatens their wealth or power. Government mandated programs funded via taxes of course, can not be so easily withdrawn from.

Rutger Bregman got on my radar after some of his recent remarks at Davos at the World Economic Forum. His willingness to speak truth to the faces of the powerful is refreshing and inspiring. His comment about tax avoidance at Davos, that he feels like he was “at a firefighter’s conference and no one was allowed to speak about water”. Perhaps it’s just because I’m personally feeling inspired, and therefore inspired to look, but I feel that we are seeing a new crop of international leftists arising who are not merely “resisting”. Resistance in and of itself, particularly in the era of Trump is ultimately a sterile act. It merely attempts to stem the bleeding, without being able to move far, far past our current traumatized state into the areas of healing, growth and regeneration. I’ve been written about Permaculture, an ecological movement which ultimately arose out of a frustration with the resistance oriented environmentalism of the 1970s and early 80s. Permaculture posits a pragmatic and positive micro-economic solution: regenerative agriculture and self-sustainability, a permanent human culture. But of course we should be able to think about the larger picture as well, and here we come to the role of the state.

Rutger Bregman is embracing this challenge, the challenge to think positively about the future in an active sense. What can we do to solve some of the problems we are faced with? What is the role of the state? Is it possible to bring about a more just, sustainable and humane society? The answer in short, is that Bregman posits that a better future is in fact possible. I have only begun to explore his work so won’t attempt to summarize his ideas, but from the talks that I’ve seen, I very much appreciate the direction of his thinking. Importantly, he is not alone in this type of active, positive thinking. My favorite American politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is also pushing forward a bold new direction with her recently launched Green New Deal resolution in the US Congress. The fatalistic hand-waving and shrugging that the left has been engaged in in recent years must end. There is a better world possible but it must be actively imagined and fought for. No billionaire philanthropic scheme will bring it about, no passive technological progress will cause it to happen. Power must be wrested once more from the hands of the billionaire ruling class and placed back in the hands of democratic movements. The first step in that process is to imagine and believe that it is possible.