bigger fish to fry

Hello,

I’ll start by saying that I had a marvelous day yesterday, with multiple great meetings of the minds, a lovely bike through Central Park all the way up to Harlem (a good place to be on Juneteenth) where we promptly got soaked by torrential NY thunderstorms. Loved it!

Speaking of those storms, it is, and is about to get, biblically hot, in escalating fashion, in much of the U.S., and probably many other parts of the world, too. If you don’t yet know what “wet bulb temperatures” are, well, the heat dome humidity explosion raining down on us from the most high might make you look it up soon.

Out of cowardice, I’ll be running back to California today. Kidding, kinda, I’m flying for my best friend’s birthday. Because, if you can show up for them, well, what else is there?

So, let’s see. I’ve said a lot already:

• There’s an invitation to literally keep cool (it’s gonna be really hot in the U.S.!)

• I’ve offered a sort of implicit acknowledgement that simply showing up for yourself and the people you love is half, if not more, of the “work” at this point. Being present. In the flesh. Physically. Paying attention. Propinquity. This is also where we’ll end the piece. Holding one another close.

That’s probably hearty enough for you all to stew on for a while. But I won’t end it there.

Rather, this has been the lilting interlude.

Even though I’m leaving NY to escape the heat, I, will not, keep cool. ;)

No, once again, I will not bite my tongue. At least not in this piece. I wrote this to offer a collective exhale (or scream) to so many people I know who, owing to the buttoned-up nature of their jobs and sterling reputations and responsibilities to others, and genuine, veritable fears about political retribution, might not be able to speak out.

I’ll do it. I can. It’s my pleasure.

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GLOVES OFF

In writing this newsletter, I often wonder whether it is impactful, where that impact lies, and what shape it might take. I’m not wholly at a loss for answers. Sometimes, someone gets a job facilitated moderately directly by my orchestration. Or I meet a founder and/or company that the venture capital team I work for invests in. Or I write about a company or founder, and someone else goes and works for them, invests in them, or buys their product, or whatever else. Ideally, two KC readers will get married one day!

You get the idea.

It’s also worth reminding myself (as I am doing here) that often, a crystal-clear identification of a problem is valuable in and of itself. Why? Because, in its absence, it’s easy to wander around with the vague, prevailing notion that something’s amiss, and many things may really be ailing you. But, again, speaking of myself here, sometimes I can go a long time before it becomes abundantly clear what the set of things, people, places, or parasites that ail me are. Which gets in the way of doing something about it all.

Bear with me while I draw one more analogy. There's a great scene in the movie Relatos Salvajes, which I recommend highly as it can do a lot of the talking about the disorientation of the present moment that many folks feel. In the movie, which I am rewatching while writing this — as rain pours down in Brooklyn, a smile on my face — a middle-aged man goes to a bureaucratic establishment somewhere in Spain to contest a parking ticket. When he enters the conversation with a government employee, he’s already agitated. As he begins trading barbs with the employee, he grows increasingly more so, especially as it becomes clear that he will not be:

• Absolved from the financial penalty of the ticket

• There is no use in trying to reason with the government employee

• There is nowhere else to turn

The scene culminates with the aggrieved asking the government employee to speak with the manager, as it were. El Jefe. The Boss.

To which the government employee responds, “There is none.” (in Spanish).

Then the aggrieved goes ballistic and begins bashing at the bulletproof glass.

Jesus, take the wheel

Growing up and into adulthood has, for me, had plenty of echoes of the “No one is at the steering wheel” experience. No one is home. There is no manager to escalate the situation to. No one is coming to save us. OK. Noted.

Simultaneously, there’s also a lot of refraction and resonance I’ve experienced of late around the “seven rooms theory,” which effectively states that even when you think you've reached a room in which some big league decisions are being made, perhaps yourself being a decision maker, there's always another, more exclusive room you haven't discovered or don't have access to. There will always be rooms where decisions are made, seats of power, big ones, wholly out of the modal person’s entire sphere of influence. They are as remote as a distant galaxy. I’ll never enter em’, can’t even conceive of em’.

Suffice it to say that is all frustrating and deflating.

But I’m not breaking bulletproof glass. Yet.

To get to the news-y bits, perhaps little has made the full, abysmal weigh of what I’m homing in on here more iteratively clear for me than the recent push by Senator Mike Lee (R, UT) to basically execute a reverse Louisiana (and/or Alaska) purchase, which would see the U.S. open up 250 million+ acres of public land for privatization in exchange for, effectively, a pittance.

This would be the single largest sale of national public land in modern history.

It would, to state the problem clearly, constitute the achievement of a logical extreme at which we’ve long been hard at work, namely, mortgaging the future for the shortest possible present.

Which is a large driver of countless other challenges I could identify on the sustainability beat, be it greenhouse gas emissions, global warming, biodiversity loss, the erasure of labor that autonomous technologies and AI will usher in to some degree in no short amount of time, and for which there is no plan to reimagine how people earn an income, to say nothing of a sense of purpose, dignity, and selfhood. I could go on. You get it.

Symptoms of diseases

Will this atomically abysmal land grab and slapdash sale pass as part of a wholly insolubulous reconciliation budget bill? I don’t know.

Is the fact that it has even been floated as an option sufficiently sickening? Yes

I cannot state clearly enough. THESE ARE SYMPTOMS OF DEEP ROT AND DISEASE.

What can be done in the interim about all this? Calling congresspeople, I guess? I’m not familiar with that “game,” and welcome suggestions I can circulate. Some 80% of Americans oppose this Frankenstein-like measure, nestled away into a reconciliation bill.

What I’m really here to say is that if this measure passes, the U.S. is as good as cooked. Sorry. Not irreparably, just yet, though close! And not because of the land privatization itself, per se. But because the essence of representative government has broken down completely. The prevailing federal leadership will have made clear its fundamental disinterest in doing anything in the remotest semblance of keeping with its constituencies. It is deeply disheartening how fast and loose some power brokers seem to be excited to play with the ludicrous endowment — land, oil, natural gas, metals, minerals, woods, biodiversity, acreage, you name it — that the U.S. has long enjoyed and milked, sometimes more sustainably than others, never entirely so, to achieve a fantastical, quasi-farcical standard of living and to usher in tremendous technological progress.

All to what ultimate end, though, I would ask? Emphasis on end.

I’m not averse to doing things with land. I am not averse, even, to extracting oil and natural gas and metals and minerals from land, circumstantially. I’d like, however, some semblance of an indication, again, that there is a higher-up that is a) reachable, b) will respond to reason, and c) would consider genuinely changing its mind if engaged in civil discourse. There is no such channel. There hasn’t been for some time. There is no plan. There is no number to call that I know of. There is no bell to ring. Enlighten me, if you can.

Our President himself will, in the comedic fashion he owns so well, tell you so himself:

I’m also conscious that just spreading more moral indignation, though perhaps valuable in pursuit of the problem identification, isn’t inherently valuable. But sometimes, I do feel the need to hammer the alarm bells. Even in the absence of actionable recommendations.

I could just as easily have made this whole newsletter about the specter of more Middle Eastern war, or brazen and baseless deportations made by unmarked ICE agents within U.S. borders that truly boggle the mind, or that private megalith corporations, abetted gleefully by governments, are in what is perhaps the 21^st centuries’ largest new arms race to create an artificial superintelligence for which I have seen no proposed guardrails, no public plan, and for which I have no inherent confidence or indication that anyone actually can come close to comprehending its possible shape, function, and/or implications.

Accelerationism

What is at risk here is the abnegation of all rules, norms, and communal interest. At which point entropy takes over, and it doesn’t matter how many combustion engines are replaced with EVs, or clean electron generation capacity is added to the grid, or miraculous pharmaceutical and gene editing advances AI unlocks. Or nukes get built.

There is always the possibility that the “nothing always happens” cadre is right. That in five years we’ll look back at this moment and say, “yeah, that was a pretty sketchy moment, but we muddled through. As we always do.” Could happen. I’m not convinced. And, it’ll invariably be a select set of groups that muddle through. Some may even thrive. Many will not. That is history’s saddest, invisible asterisk. Again and again.

At the very least, as per my forays into film photography, what I want to capture is a snapshot of this moment, and how literally, figuratively, and cosmically charged everything is right now. So that we don’t forget. So here goes.

click

Now, I hope things may go well, God willing.

Now, I’m going to do something else you’re taught not to, namely, call out people with way more influence than you. I just don’t care, though.

People with real, heavyweight media gravitas do not do what I am doing here for a specific reason; they save their proverbial ammunition for the most “necessary” moment. The risk, as everything begins to accelerate even faster, is that the moment will hurtle them by without their even knowing it’s gone. Maybe it already did.

Plus, given the media “game” is set so as to dramatically oversaturate communications (“all the bogus shit mixed in with the good shit” is a dialogue I overheard on the streets of New York yesterday that encasuplates it well) and Trump and umpteen other organizations and advertisers know oh-so-well how to “flood the zone” to a tee, who's gonna notice the flare that say, Obama, may shoot up sometime soon. It might flicker for a few seconds. Ahhh. Pretty flickers. A Fourth of July fireworks. Meh. Not good enough.

Not just accelerating, hurtling

In December, NASA's Parker Solar Probe set the record for the fastest human-made object in history, as it leveraged seven “swings” (really, Venus gravity assists) to slingshot into an unimaginably Icarian distance away from the Sun at 430,000 mph.

Why introduce this fun fact about the fastest man-made object?

Arguably, the U.S. is hurtling even faster. It’s not just tech acceleration with AI and robotaxis, and so on. It’s a complete loss of guardrails, jurisprudence, common decency, civility, and sanity. It’s very odd to wake up here every day, frankly. Sure, it helps a lot not to ingest any media at all. That can get you feeling pretty grounded again. I went off-grid for like 2 weeks, for crying out loud. And I came back and, within two days, was back in the same labyrinthine swirl. Go on a subway or an airplane? Into a public place? There are people, rightfully, crashing out.. Or getting deported to El Salvador. In broad daylight.

My main takeaway? We have even bigger fish to fry than we thought. A whole lot of global warming may be far from the most challenging part of the coming decade. And make no mistake, that is coming. It’ll be a bear.

And, that’s not all, folks! On top of that, with the U.S — which was once at least a pillar of stability and prosperity for some — absolutely hurtling, faster and faster… well?

Alarm bells should be pinging like popcorn in a microwave. Like popcorn in every microwave, in every suburban American home. In every microwave the world over.

What is there to do? Hold each other close, for one. You know, amidst the hurtling.

And get more creative, I guess.

& with that, creative ideas welcome! hit me up.

— nvo