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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 22 Sep 2019
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      Here’s a spectrum of “memory” genres 1. Autobiography 2. Family history 3. Personal memoir 4. Subcultural history 5. Public life memoir 6. Participant history Prediction: All of it is in trouble. Our cultural memory processes are breaking.

      3 replies 10 retweets 83 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 22 Sep 2019
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      1. Autobiography is in trouble because it’s gone quantum. Living and narrating have gotten entangled live for anyone whose life might be of interest to others. You can’t just live an interesting life and then write it down. There’s a competing record of how you performed it live.

      2 replies 4 retweets 27 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 22 Sep 2019
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      2. Family history is reality TV (it has been Kardashianized) This has been kinda dead for a while anyway. Families have been a poor unit of broader cultural memory since hereditary nobility kinda became obsolete as a type of storage.

      1 reply 0 retweets 12 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 22 Sep 2019
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      3. Personal memoir is suffering an odd fate — people are no longer sufficiently entangled in each other’s lives for long enough for that to be an interesting way to capture memories. It’s better to take a different slice, like the history of a neighborhood.

      1 reply 0 retweets 13 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 22 Sep 2019
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      4. Subcultural history is probably the only gainer here, but average size of meaningful subcultures has been declining. As memory, it’s like replacing 10 1TB discs with 10k 1GB discs. The memories are being captured in a different frequency range. We’re high-pass filtering.

      1 reply 0 retweets 11 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 22 Sep 2019
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      5. Public life memoirs are falling prey to fake news, weaponized revelations and whistleblowing, and a Rashomon effect. It’s unclear if live experiences are being captured in a way that allows for definitive accounts.

      2 replies 0 retweets 8 likes
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 22 Sep 2019
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      6. And finally, regular history is just kinda toast. Long story (ironic huh?)

      1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 22 Sep 2019
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      The future of collective memory is multitemporal. Starting ~2000, increasingly, history will be seen to have a multiple personality disorder. No canonical history plus wistful counterfactuals. Just a superposition of non-consensus histories. Like a diffraction pattern.

      10:30 PM - 22 Sep 2019
      • 5 Retweets
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      • Drake E. Paula P. Ryan MPA Rai ling 🏴 Bandeauxx. Yuli Miller 🤯 Ezekiel DT  🌗⏳ Isaac Wilks 🎤🐢
      2 replies 5 retweets 42 likes
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        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 22 Sep 2019
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          This is the rough collective version of this individual-scale argumenthttps://www.ribbonfarm.com/2019/05/30/the-age-of-diffraction/ …

          1 reply 1 retweet 13 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 22 Sep 2019
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          This idea is probably much clearer in my head than it is to anyone else 🤔

          2 replies 0 retweets 7 likes
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 22 Sep 2019
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          Simplest example I can think of: accounts of Obama administration at all these levels will harmonize (including the hostile ones) in a way the equivalent Trump corpus won’t. It’s a fundamentally higher entropy story. Smaller ‘sum > parts’ narrative surplus to form grand narrative

          2 replies 0 retweets 9 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 22 Sep 2019
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          Basically there won’t be a way to adopt a point of view that could call default or canonical. Only a bunch of alts. There will be nothing it is like to be a “spectator from nowhere” of history. If you try to write for this point of view there will be no readers for it.

          1 reply 0 retweets 10 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 22 Sep 2019
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          All history will be revisionist history basically, with the role of default being taken over by a data ubiquity that tells no story, but undermines all of them.

          1 reply 1 retweet 8 likes
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 22 Sep 2019
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          The log level shall reign supreme

          1 reply 1 retweet 4 likes
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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 22 Sep 2019
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          Collective memory is a form of identity creation. A way to create a point of view that can be adopted by others in the future. That’s how you engineer read/write/append access to it. This is now becoming untenable except as solipsism.

          1 reply 0 retweets 8 likes
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        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 23 Sep 2019
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          To quote myself: narratives tell archetypes how to evolve, archetypes tell narratives how to curve. Narratives become indexical to self perpetuate by enabling identities with rewrite permission. Soon: all history is revisionist, all integration of memory is appropriation 😆

          4 replies 0 retweets 12 likes
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        10. End of conversation
        1. Turil Cronburg‏ @thewiseturtle 24 Sep 2019
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          Replying to @vgr @aaronzlewis

          History has always been bifurcated, just like the future. Life is a fractal woven fabric in many dimensions, not a single time-line.

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