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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

This is my conversational account. For my work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Dec 2018
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      This is important. Pre-neoliberalism, there was a pretense of "impersonal" institutions, but they weren't really. They systematically advantaged the local cultural majority in subtle/not-so-subtle ways. That's the real affirmative action, except we never called it that.

      1 reply 3 retweets 12 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Dec 2018
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      What we instead called "affirmative action" was efforts to take nominal "impersonal" institutional missions seriously and release them from de facto clientelistic capture by cultural majorities. But even best efforts of the left could't match how well neoliberalism achieved it.

      1 reply 2 retweets 7 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Dec 2018
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      The thing is, neoliberalism recognized that the real thing to make impersonal was the foundational looting structure of clientelistic politics (invented in the US in the 1830s, now the global standard, see Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay).

      2 replies 2 retweets 6 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Dec 2018
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      By contrast, the LBJ great society model (and similar things worldwide) made the mistake of trying to make the aspirational, de jure, positive mission of institutions more impersonal/equal, rather than the de facto expropriation/looting mission.

      1 reply 2 retweets 5 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Dec 2018
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      Here's another way to think of it: "spoils" come from war. And war is basically at least half the institutional landscape, and every institution has a "peace" (aspirational, de jure, welfare mission) and "war" (expropriational, de facto, looting mission) side to it.

      1 reply 2 retweets 6 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Dec 2018
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      There is no point trying to make the peace side more truly impersonal if you leave the war side alone. There is no point in university admissions affirmative action if you don't equalize the "spoils of degrees" post-graduation ecosystem. Neoliberalism managed it.

      1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Dec 2018
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      We are now seeing the effects of that. Around the world, the global ethnonationalist wave is a result of 20-30 years of dismantlement of institutional affirmative action for local cultural majorities by the democratized looting/expropriation regime of neoliberalism.

      2 replies 5 retweets 12 likes
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    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Dec 2018
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      Yes, it helps to be a cis-white-male to play in the game in the US (and a brahmin male in India and Han in China and Kikuyu in Kenya or whatever), but mainly you have to be willing and skilled enough to play in the Hobbesian meritocratic game of expropriation/privatization.

      1 reply 2 retweets 11 likes
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    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Dec 2018
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      And predictably, the great worldwide Hobbesian A/B test delivered exactly the result us cynics would expect: people of all races/types are equally good at rising to the top of such games. Just look at the rogues gallery of high-level billion-dollar scammers around the world.

      1 reply 2 retweets 9 likes
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    10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Dec 2018
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      The losers everywhere have been the *protected* mediocrities with cultural-majority affiliations everywhere, who had gotten complacent in their sense of institutionally validated (and undeservedly rewarded) sense of being "better" as a member of a "state-chosen" people.

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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Dec 2018
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      So the idea that "when you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression", read it as "institutionally advantaged looting/spoils privileges", not lip-service narrative spotlight. For "equality" read "equality of looting/expropriation opportunity" not institutional access.

      10:53 AM - 3 Dec 2018
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      • Corn Woman 🌽 Dan listens to the world changing I don’t take responsibility at all Peter Wang Daniel Pritchett stupid twitt account Matt "MSG superfan" Olson Ari Nielsen hikikomorphism🏳️‍🌈🏝🛰️
      1 reply 2 retweets 9 likes
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        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Dec 2018
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          If you think about it, in a grand narrative sense, the pissed off seething-ressentiment ethnomajoritarian masses were never forgotten. They had continuous claim on being "real" Americans. It just got hollowed out, with real rewards being deregulated for democratic looting.

          1 reply 0 retweets 8 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Dec 2018
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          This ~40 year trajectory is why I'm ultimately not worried about the "SJW" bogeyperson (heh!) threat. They're merely trying to recode old, shrinking spoils system in their favor. What good is control of universities or academic publishing if action has left the building?

          1 reply 1 retweet 9 likes
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Dec 2018
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          Public funding for "impersonal" institutions everywhere is shrinking, and being replaced with equivalent neoliberal equal-opportunity expropriation institution. SJWs are fighting over shrinking old pie. Ethnonationalists are mad about not getting first slice of growing new pie.

          1 reply 2 retweets 5 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Dec 2018
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          SJWs are fighting over the dead carcass of the old world. The amount of damage they can do is fundamentally limited. The ethnonationalist right though, is threatening the living, growing thing. The amount of damage they can do is basically infinite. They might kill golden goose.

          1 reply 6 retweets 13 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Dec 2018
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          Can we do better than neoliberalism? Yeah, sure, We can and we must, since big new challenges like climate change seem out of reach for its institutions (it is *powered* by tragedy of the commons in the worst case). More critically, it is based on nation states.

          2 replies 4 retweets 11 likes
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Dec 2018
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          I for one would like to eat my cake (impersonal, democratic opportunity spaces) and have it too (spaces that are based on expanding knowledge rather than Hobbesian looting). Unclear how to get there, but that's what I want.

          2 replies 3 retweets 13 likes
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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Dec 2018
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          @threadreaderapp unroll

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        9. End of conversation

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