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

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 31 Mar 2019
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      History is all the identities we’ve inhabited so far

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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 31 Mar 2019
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      Kinda makes sense that the end of history would be marked by terminal identitarianism. Consequence, not cause. If nobody can find a way to continue everybody’s identity evolution, history ends.

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      • visa is working on his ebook DORMANTYOUTH The Legendary Dragon Alephwyr, named Alephwyr, BA Gordon Brander Jonas Obleser BrianSJ
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        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 31 Mar 2019
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          Identitarian consensus: when everybody agrees what boxes everybody is in. It’s a much deeper state of stable equilibrium than everybody simply having a fixed identity. The way common knowledge is a deeper equilibrium than mere belief or even mutual belief.

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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 31 Mar 2019
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          There was a funny Volkswagen ad where an Indian guy responds to some question about yoga with “just because I drive a Volkswagen you think I’m into yoga?” It’s funny because it simultaneously acknowledges and subverts an identitarian consensus Also Seinfeld anti-dentite joke

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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 31 Mar 2019
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          An identitarian consensus is also a set of roles and permissions within a narrative. Stereotyping is just the shallowest layer. History ends at an identitarian consensus not because the narrative ends but because it becomes 100% tropey

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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 31 Mar 2019
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          The instinct behind simple role-swaps (eg female or black superheroes) as a way to break out of an identitarian consensus equilibrium is solid but... naive. Like transposing a tune to a new key rather than composing a new one. Doesn’t restart history, just phase-shifts it.

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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 31 Mar 2019
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          An example of a history-restart type shift is from Campbellian Monomyth hero to LeGuinesque Carrier Bag unheroine. Doctor Who pulled that off, though it has other weaknesses.

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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 31 Mar 2019
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          Real history edition: when women stop leading like men. Good or bad, you can’t ignore the fact that it’s equilibrium-breaking history restart/reboot. This ain’t Margaret Thatcher or Indira Gandhi style https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/opinion/women-leadership-jacinda-ardern.html …

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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 31 Mar 2019
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          The link between end of history and identitarian consensus also explains why “diversity” as a simplistic alternative to a straight-white-male-centric equilibrium doesn’t work for anything except post-apocalyptic survivalist stories. That’s just the aftermath of the end of history

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        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 31 Mar 2019
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          To extend the music metaphor, this is not a transposition, it’s a polyphony degenerating into a cacophony. Random noise around an EoH equilibrium.

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        10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 31 Mar 2019
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          Experimenting with fiction has shown me just how terrible social identities are for writing believable, growing characters. It’s almost like trying to make an address behave like a house. A category error. An address can let you guess a lot about a house but isn’t itself a house.

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        11. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 31 Mar 2019
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          Otoh, you can’t just make up a character from, say, a set of archetypal inner paradoxes. The context matters in a way that becomes immediately obvious when you try to name a character. A name instantly induces a world.

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        12. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 31 Mar 2019
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          The thing about history-reboot level narratives is that any one local binding, like the name of a key character, immediately binds the rest of the narrative as well. Choosing any one thing is like choosing everything. And now the whole story is a clockwork deterministic universe.

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        13. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 31 Mar 2019
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          The best you can do is “glitch” the global binding a bit by simultaneously acknowledging/subverting a piece of it, like my Volkswagen-yoga example. This is not an archetypal paradox driving a character OR a world paradox driving a history. It’s the nexus *between* the two.

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        14. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 31 Mar 2019
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          This creates *just* enough room, like a 99.9% global binding instead of 100%, for history to get restarted. Tiny new root sneaking through the cracks of a tessellation defining a world.

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        15. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 31 Mar 2019
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          Note btw that most science fiction is only cosmetically a building of alternative worlds. Much of the average stuff is simple relabeling. The better ones just acknowledge it openly.

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        16. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 31 Mar 2019
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          An example of doing more is Dark Materials, where cosmetic similarities suggest a glitchy parallel universe that’s not quite like ours. Deepness in the Sky also pulls that off by constructing an uncanny valley of spider-beings whose story is told via overwrought human mapping.

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        17. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 31 Mar 2019
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          I’ve been trying to systematize these intuitions by playing with situated archetypes that work across a whole class of worlds rather than inducing a specific one. Then you suggest the whole universe via “beat” frequencies that emerge in juxtaposition with a familiar universe

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        18. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 31 Mar 2019
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          Getting back to history, a narrative is only a history if it’s not in an end-of-history identitarian consensus equilibrium. Good fiction has the feel of history.

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        19. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 31 Mar 2019
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          It’s not enough that the world changes (plot) or characters grow individually or in mutuality. The world and characters must change together in, for want of a better term, Turing complete ways. Even a strange attractor or brownian motion won’t do.

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        20. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 31 Mar 2019
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          It’s the entanglement that evolves irreversibly. And the characters don’t have to be “rich” in a literary sense for this. In fact that’s often a liability. Even 2d caricatures that are terrible by rules of “good” character dev can drive historic narrative if entangled right

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        21. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 31 Mar 2019
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          This stuff is very hard. That’s why only a few cases have been solved analytically. For example evil twins from evil parallel universes who differ in social identity only by a goatee (van dyke actually...) is a surprisingly sophisticated device if you dig a bit into it.

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        22. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 31 Mar 2019
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          “Good” and “evil” are shorthand codes/world-hashes for 2 different narrative equilibria, with a leak in either direction capable of restarting history. Good/evil is a property of the *entanglement* between the characters and home universes.

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        23. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 31 Mar 2019
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          Importantly, social identity is *only* an address. That is why a trivial marker (facial hair) works to distinguish the two universes. It happens to be gendered but that’s unimportant. It could be a nongendered trait like long hair.

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        24. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 31 Mar 2019
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          Interestingly, Marxist thought gets this whole idea in a degenerate way: “none of us is free until all of us are free” or “the oppressor requires liberation as much as the oppressed.” That’s a good special case of entangled history.

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        25. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 31 Mar 2019
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          Where it fails is treating aspects of the context, like class, as immutable. A workers paradise isn’t classless. It’s a degenerate one-class, end-of-history society. To transcend class-structure, you need something with equal expressive power that preserves Turing-completeness.

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        26. End of conversation

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