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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 5 Oct 2019
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      It's funny how people think a post-apocalyptic landscape will be relatively flat socioeconomically. At most they think there will be small-scale warlords or Dunbar-scale anarchist communes. No. There will be deathstar billionaires with private armies and narrow-deep tech stacks.

      24 replies 55 retweets 278 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 5 Oct 2019
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      The industrial age has made us (falsely) believe that an "industrial base" has to necessarily be a nation-state scale at minimum. No. A complete industrial tech stack can be built as a fairly narrow single-billionaire pillar.

      3 replies 12 retweets 70 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 5 Oct 2019
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      A traditional "industrial base" has steel, sulphuric acid, power plants etc. at the bottom, and space programs and aircraft carriers at the top. This kind of stack can now be replicated with a *very* narrow footprint. I think you could do it for $3-4 billion in a small city.

      6 replies 11 retweets 69 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 5 Oct 2019
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      "Nation-state industrial base" has basically been miniaturized to billionaire scale. In terms of civilizational capability, it's the equivalent of mainframes evolving into smartphones (smartphone equivalent of civilization being postapocalyptic billionaire redoubt)

      3 replies 8 retweets 40 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 5 Oct 2019
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      I mean, I'm larping extended-universe builder in bits form, but with a few billion you can actually do it in atoms space. There are no necessary capabilities of nation states that cannot now be maintained by a small-scale billionaire.

      1 reply 6 retweets 35 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 5 Oct 2019
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      If there is to be a broad-based, inclusive, participatory form of civilization to succeed the nation state, it cannot be based on atoms-tech. It has to be based on software-tech that billionaires can neither replicate, nor compete with.

      3 replies 6 retweets 31 likes
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    7. Nathaniel Eliot‏ @temujin9 5 Oct 2019
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      Replying to @vgr

      Working on that bit. Can't promise I've got a firm path yet.

      1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 5 Oct 2019
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      Replying to @temujin9

      multitemporality ftw

      1:09 PM - 5 Oct 2019
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      • Nathaniel Eliot
      1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
        1. Nathaniel Eliot‏ @temujin9 5 Oct 2019
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          Replying to @vgr

          Like lightning: branching downward now, looking for the ground.

          0 replies 0 retweets 0 likes
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