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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 3 Aug 2019
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      We talk about post-capitalism like it’s a thing, but not post-democracy. All post-democracy paths seem like reactionary paths backwards. I suspect post-capitalism seems more real because it feels like we can improve on money as a technology but not on voting as a technology.

      8 replies 14 retweets 64 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Aug 2019
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      Money and votes are both transactional technologies of ongoing consent. I give/take money from you = I consent to mutually update a contracted non-violent relationship state I vote with/against you = I consent to mutually update a contracted non-violent relationship state

      10:48 AM - 3 Aug 2019
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      • Priya ajinomoto GP Nandhini Arya Stark Stephen mutual Rahul Ramchandani kenshō Leon Mendip
      1 reply 1 retweet 18 likes
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        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Aug 2019
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          The diff is money is positive-only by design. Negative monetary transactions are theft or extraction (non-consensual without value in return, whether by thieves or the state in the form of fines) But votes can be “negative” in the sense you and I can vote for competing sides.

          3 replies 1 retweet 8 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Aug 2019
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          I think the last time I thought of technologies of consent (2014) and how they enforce the social contract via the transactional medium of votes, I missed this crucial difference with money. Votes can go negative by design. Money is “win-win or no deal”.https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/01/10/consent-of-the-surveiled/ …

          2 replies 1 retweet 11 likes
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Aug 2019
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          Votes are like the electromagnetic force. Money is like gravity. Extending the analogy, designing new consent technologies is like working with electronics. Working with new market technologies is like working with aerospace technologies. Electronics is harder than rocketry.

          2 replies 0 retweets 11 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Aug 2019
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          Another difference is that money, as a zero-or-positive-only mechanism design, couples neatly with “progress” narratives. There’s a reason it’s easier to spin whiggish Hans-Rosling stories around economic metrics than political ones.

          1 reply 1 retweet 10 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Aug 2019
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          Aside: I’ve been noodling on this physics analogy since forever, going back to my Brief History of Corporations post (2011, probably 3 or 4 on my all-time hits list) . Most recent riff was in 2015https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/08/04/the-four-forces-for-sociology/ …

          1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Aug 2019
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          The difficulty of imagining post-democracy conditions that are NOT backslides to monarchism or communism or paleo-hunting-party libertarianism is a DIRECT consequence of the fact that it’s hard to spin “progress” narratives around the politics of the human condition.

          2 replies 1 retweet 11 likes
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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Aug 2019
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          Are we better off materially? Food, longevity, freedom from pain and disease etc? Absolutely. Politically, are we “better” people? Doubtful. Much of apparent political progress like abolition of slavery was really a positive externality of material/economic progress.

          1 reply 0 retweets 15 likes
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        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Aug 2019
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          We didn’t become better people. Material progress simply made it easier to be good rather than evil to each other in more and more ways. Did we make spiritual progress? Has consciousness been continuously raised since the Neolithic revolution? Most religions argue the opposite.

          4 replies 1 retweet 24 likes
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        10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Aug 2019
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          You have the fall from Eden in all Abrahamic religions. You have the decline into Kaliyuga in Hinduism. For the record I think this is bs. But there is a historicist narrative og political and spiritual evolution that is coherent: Fukuyama’s end-of-history model.

          1 reply 1 retweet 9 likes
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        11. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Aug 2019
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          Fukuyama refrains from a valuation of the story that “ends” in liberal democracy. Besides gesturing at Nietzche’s contemptuous “men without backs” last-man archetype, he simply indicates that there IS a secular component to political/spiritual evolution. It’s not just cyclic.

          1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
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        12. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Aug 2019
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          Others are less shy about it. Arendt’s model in The Human Condition (which presciently foreshadows Fukuyama) is clearly 90% a “fall from Grecian grace”. She sees some good in the story — for example the “invention” of forgiveness in Christianity — but it’s mostly a decline.

          1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes
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        13. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Aug 2019
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          So, where does that leave us. We’ll probably get to post-market economics with blockchain sand smart contracts and the convergence of code, law, and finance. That’s great. Fun times.

          1 reply 0 retweets 7 likes
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        14. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Aug 2019
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          Will we get to a post-democratic politics, with a new technology, or is Fukuyama right and liberal democracy is the end of the road? With the only ways out being backslides? Or will technology create new modes of consensual mutuality beyond “voting” that allow further evolution?

          4 replies 0 retweets 7 likes
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        15. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Aug 2019
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          This is perhaps the most interesting and important Big Think question today. The reason I was skeptical of the Cowen/Collison Progress Studies proposal is that they assume economic progress narratives can be easily extrapolated into political/spiritual spheres. This is doomed.

          2 replies 0 retweets 13 likes
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        16. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Aug 2019
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          Questions of political/spiritual “progress” are independently foundational. They are coupled to material/economic progress narratives (in fact they supply whatever assumed positive or negative valence the former takes on) and can be driven by tech. But they are not derivative.

          1 reply 0 retweets 11 likes
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        17. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Aug 2019
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          To connect to my earlier physics analogy. Progress Studies in the Cowen/Collison sense is tautological. If your basic process models are *defined* and *designed* to be positive-only, of course net evolution will be “positive”, with negatives attributable to noise of some sort.

          1 reply 1 retweet 6 likes
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        18. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Aug 2019
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          Until you add process models — politics and spirituality — that can *independently* take on negative values, you can only make vacuous, high-minded statements about “progress” within an assumed consensus Whig epistemology. How do you do that? Take Fukuyama, Arendt etc seriously.

          1 reply 3 retweets 5 likes
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        19. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Aug 2019
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          Going by responses so far, it sounds like people think I’m pointing to a design imagination gap. Like there’s a way to put existing tech together in a new thingocracy or thingarchy that will get us to “post democracy”. No. Nothing ending in -cracy or -archy can fit the bill.

          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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        20. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Aug 2019
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          There’s an *invention* gap here. We need a new breakthrough technology that makes new classes of design possible. Writing was one. The printing press was one. Radio/TV too. Most recently cryptography. Your -cracy or -archy is just a remix unless it uses a new tech in a new way.

          1 reply 0 retweets 9 likes
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        21. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Aug 2019
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          The mark of that is the creation of new political/spiritual freedoms that didn’t even exist before. For example: Literacy (printing press) liberated minds to explore new intellectual domains. Literate politics organized that new freedom.

          2 replies 0 retweets 5 likes
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        22. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Aug 2019
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          Cryptography might create new political freedoms, but this isn’t some trivial extension of economic affordances like blockchain voting. What new freedom does it create and how does it organize the collective use of that freedom? What’s the new freedom literacy?

          2 replies 0 retweets 7 likes
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        23. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Aug 2019
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          My favorite candidate new freedom that could be organized by new political models is mobility. Live/travel freely anywhere in the world. My preferred post-democratic human condition would solve for vastly enhanced mobility.

          4 replies 2 retweets 16 likes
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        24. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Aug 2019
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          About ~60% or more humans live in meaningful democracies today iirc. But only 3% of humans travel beyond national borders today. The tech problem is zero-carbon transport. The economic problem is making it orders of magnitude cheaper. The political problem is open borders.

          6 replies 4 retweets 26 likes
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        25. End of conversation

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