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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 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 9 likes
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    2. 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 8 likes
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    3. 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 15 likes
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    4. 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 12 likes
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    5. 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 8 likes
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    6. 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 8 likes
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    7. 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 5 likes
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    8. 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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    9. 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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    10. 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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      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.

      12:09 PM - 3 Aug 2019
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      • David Oudiette Raoul Kennedy ajinomoto GP Callum Flack AJW Chris Reid I Was A Teenage Greek Model Stephen mutual
      4 replies 2 retweets 19 likes
        1. 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 5 retweets 28 likes
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        2. Lawrence of Dystopia‏ @laprice 3 Aug 2019
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          Unless eveeryone is roaming around in sailboats and solar powered vans the carbon-cost of vastly enhanced mobility is going to be ruinous and the freedom will be short lived.

          1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Aug 2019
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          Replying to @laprice

          See next tweet

          0 replies 0 retweets 1 like
        4. End of conversation
        1. Maynard Handley‏ @handleym99 3 Aug 2019
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          Is the goal constant mobility? Or a few movements till you find your place and settle there? Either way, this seems like a "careful what you wish for", where extreme sorting is likely to lead to extreme outcomes.

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        1. Stephen‏ @Phreekedelic 3 Aug 2019
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          Replying to @vgr

          @Ada_Palmer

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