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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 Feb 10
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      Vast oversimplification of course, but you could get a zeroth-order linear story of your life as progress/regress by projecting your geographic movement on a NE-SW diagonal line.

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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 10
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      For example, my story is: [India-->], Ann Arbor, Austin, Ann Arbor, Ithaca, Rochester, DC, Vegas, Seattle, LA. Or PSSRSRPPP. P= progress S=sideways R=regress

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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 10
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      If I make it a bit more complex and weight a leg in inverse proportion to distance from Boston-LA turnpike, I could code my Rochester-DC move as "progress" (projection moved backwards, but I got closer to the turnpike). It's a bit like doubling back to ramp onto a highway.

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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 10
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      In general, the topology is more complex of course. SF to Midland, TX is severe regression, but SF to Austin is more of a mild regression, with a lot of sideways. The network of major cities has its own topology, which distorts the base R^2 plane topology.

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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 10
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      The biggest political conflict in the US is probably between those who are invested in the current topology of the Narrative Highway System (NHS) of the US and those who think it is decay and decline.

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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 10
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      The American Dream, unlike Old World life scripts, has always had a very high-legibility geographic component. Indian dream scripts for example, do NOT have such a strong geographic component. There's at best a very weak "going to Bombay to join Bollywood" narrative.

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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 10
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      At best there is a weak, generic provinces --> big city narrative without strong bindings for particular big cities. I think this is because America only has a brief peasant history, and no old cities, so entire narrative imagination gets projected onto network of young cities.

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    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 10
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      "imaginations which have no peasant traditions to give them character but flutter and flaunt — sheer rags-succumbing without emotion save numbed terror” -- To Elsie, by William Carlos Williams ht @nils_gilman for this key point.https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46485/to-elsie …

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    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 10
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      If I had to get all mathematical and imagine a topology for US narrative space, I'd make it a planar graph of charismatic cities, with an extra node in the middle titled "heartland" to which all of flyover country is mapped. Sounds callous, but that's really it.

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    10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 10
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      The American heartland is a trope more than a place. Specific interstices within the city graphs do not have strong identities. At best, you can decompose "heartland" into "Midwest", "Texas", "Prairies" and "Old South", and those are not intrinsic, but artifacts of global history

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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 10
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      By contrast, agrarian heartland of India for instance, is strongly differentiated. Starting with entire mutually unintelligible languages. If you did a narrative-space graph of India, ratio would be reversed. There would be few charismatic cities, many charismatic heartlands.

      3:42 PM - 10 Feb 2020
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        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 10
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          This means, as narrative spaces go, the US is peculiarly tractable. Stories that play out on the charismatic-city narrative graph are unusually legible in way old world stories are not. That's why, for instance, a road trip is a better narrative template in the US than elsewhere.

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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 10
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          this is also why attempts to predict the future of the US in response to the Great Weirding by looking at countries that got hit earlier (USSR, Japan, Greece, Britain) are misguided. American exceptionalism in classical terms may be dead, but this is still a weird country.

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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 10
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          Hmm... I'm now thinking of the Great Weirding as a shock wave that unfolded in at least 4 parts: USSR (1989-2000), Islamic sphere (1992-2007), West (starting with Greece, 2009), and finally Asia (China and India, both around 2017-19: Xi elevation and Modi 2nd term)

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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 10
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          Hmm. The Great Weirding in this 4-wave form kinda follows the logic of clash of civilizations huntington model. It didn't go from localized weirding to great weirding until it hit America though. That's when the whole thing came together as a global shitshow.

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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 10
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          A lot of my thinking/ideas now are of the sort that would best suit a sort of sprawling podcast format rather than essay... mainly because I'm getting increasingly lazy about writing up all but the tightest, hardest ideas in longform

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        7. End of conversation

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