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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 10 Oct 2019
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      Portals vs flags is a good lens for breaking down fun-banter twitter vs beef-only missionary derp twitter. I’m 100% portal and most of my futile conflicts are due to mistakenly engaging a flag-twitter person with portal twitter rules of engagement.https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/06/25/portals-and-flags/ …

      5 replies 15 retweets 57 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Oct 2019
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      Portal: seduce someone into a fun new way of looking at the world, tends to be a process of yes, and improv-banter Flag: Preach a sermon repeatedly in a hundred different ways and gather a crowd around you that wants repeated reinforcement of a threatened existing perspective

      1 reply 3 retweets 27 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Oct 2019
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      Under high-VUCA,* portal discourses try to give you an experimental toolkit to process what’s going on Flag discourses try to drown out the VUCA via positive-feedback amplification of a single familiar, reassuring signal. * Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity

      1 reply 1 retweet 15 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Oct 2019
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      Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Venkatesh Rao

      Earlier, I pointed out that virtue ethics is most adaptive under VUCA, consequentialist next most, and deontological, the least adaptive. These map to flag twitter, hybrid, and portal twitter.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1182155140360392705?s=21 …

      Venkatesh Rao added,

      Venkatesh Rao @vgr
      I forget who made this argument, but it was in a large-group OODA loop discussion in New York: the higher the VUCA in a large-scale conflict environment, the more virtue ethics is strategically adaptive because it can accumulate a following via imitability.
      Show this thread
      1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Oct 2019
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      Ironically, the effectiveness at dissolving the VUCA and moving beyond is in the reverse order. It is adaptive in the sense a cancer can be more adaptive than normal functions in a body. It will win, but kill the host in the process.

      1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Oct 2019
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      The Great Weirding is a particular kind of VUCA. The fragile new thing feeding on the sclerotic old thing being dismantled. It is the VUCA of being a cell inside a pupal stage caught between caterpillar and butterfly ways of being. It is pupal VUCA.

      1 reply 0 retweets 7 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Oct 2019
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      Twitter is a microcosm of a pupal world, Software eating the world. Digital era eating industrial era in order to be born. The process is happening everywhere from Hong Kong to Syria to the White House, but twitter is in a sense ground zero. The indicator battleground.

      9:35 PM - 10 Oct 2019
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      • mutual Mike Wamungu Pit Rahul Ramchandani Dave Snodgrass absurdest absurdist 🌷 stupid twitt account Herr Dr Mr Modern Major General brrr Seitz
      1 reply 2 retweets 8 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Oct 2019
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          It is not where the most consequential things happen, but it is where the most revealing things happen. The things that reveal how we might break out of pupal VUCA. Because there’s an interesting near-balance between portal and flag forces here (advantage flags).

          1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Oct 2019
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          Tiktok is too portal, meatspace is too flag, Twitter is Goldilocks zone. If portal twitter can hold out and eventually out evolve flag Twitter, there is some hope for the world at large.

          2 replies 0 retweets 9 likes
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Oct 2019
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          Flag twitter is about holding on to dying ways of being in a spirit of grim courage under mortal existential threat. Apres nous le deluge. Portal twitter is about experimentally flexing clumsy new modes of being in a spirit of play. Le deluge be damned.

          1 reply 0 retweets 11 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Oct 2019
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          To flag twitter, portal twitter seems like a nihilistic threat, fiddling while Rome burns, throwing open the doors to the barbarians. To portal twitter, the self-important sermonizing of flag twitter seems like a deadly cancer, preventing the new world from being born.

          2 replies 0 retweets 11 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Oct 2019
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          Portal twitter us about approaching the edge of the void, working up the courage to plunge in, making nervous jokes and memes on the edge. Portal twitter knows what’s at stake and that the only way out is through.

          1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Oct 2019
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          Flag Twitter believes if you retreat energetically enough, by ignoring the pupal weirdness loudly enough with amplified sermonizing, the void will close, and an old kind of normalcy will return.

          1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Oct 2019
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          Reduced to practice, portal twitter is basically “generate VUCA to eat VUCA”. A discourse that itself delights in volatility (inconsistency), uncertainty (improvisation), complexity (wordplay, nuance), ambiguity (irony etc). Ashby’s law of requisite variety, memes edition.

          1 reply 2 retweets 9 likes
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        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Oct 2019
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          Good, evil, or neutral, portal twitter is always chaotic. Good, evil, or neutral, flag twitter is always lawful. (neutral evil, neutral good, and true neutral are brands and orgs playing twitter badly)

          3 replies 1 retweet 10 likes
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        10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Oct 2019
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          MtG experts could probably work out the interaction dynamics better than me. I don’t have time for game theory 🙂

          2 replies 0 retweets 3 likes
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        11. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Oct 2019
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          But the BIG takeaway. Portal twitter and flag twitter don’t mix. Even if they’re nominally on the same side by the same definition of “good”. Their beliefs about how to break out are just too divergent. It’s easier to spar with “evil” along your own axis (chaotic or lawful).

          1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
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        12. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Oct 2019
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          Tldr: Look at someone’s reply threads. If it looks like a town hall Q&A where they hold court with “my gavel, my norms” posture, it is flag twitter. If it’s at least 50% shitposting and banter in reply threads, it is portal twitter. Engage with caution.

          2 replies 0 retweets 10 likes
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        13. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Oct 2019
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          Poll: If you read this far, what kind of twitter are you part of

          5 replies 0 retweets 1 like
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        14. End of conversation

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