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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 Apr 7
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      Kinda interesting that the century of American globalization and the century of Chinese globalization both have a pandemic about 25 years in. I’d date the former to the 1893 Chicago world fair, and the latter to the death of Deng Xiaoping, 1997.

      4 replies 12 retweets 56 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 7
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      Recent scholarship suggests the “Spanish” flu started in the US (it’s never been clear where it started though scholars least knew that “Spanish” was an artifact of Spain not censoring its press as a neutral in WW1)https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/journal-plague-year-180965222/ …

      2 replies 0 retweets 12 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 7
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      Wild theory: maybe causing a pandemic is sort of a debutante move as a globalization power. The Black Death appears to have started in Central Asia, around the time arguably Mongols/Turks created the first wave of globalization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death#Predominant_modern_theory …

      1 reply 1 retweet 17 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 7
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      Kinda makes sense. Globalization means you drive a wave of improved communication and transportation infrastructure. So diseases ride the pipes too. The Black Death also appears to have had a climate change component. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_Late_Middle_Ages#Climate_change_and_plague_epidemic_correlation …pic.twitter.com/3Z3NQRNq7P

      1 reply 0 retweets 8 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 7
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      Our time also has climate change, and we’ve already had one climate-related pandemic. It just wasn’t among humans. It was among Saiga deer. Adjacent possible warning. Covid19 has no climate angle that I can see, but the risk of climate change and pandemic risk combing is there.

      2 replies 0 retweets 5 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 7
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      “In November 2015 Dr. Richard A. Kock...reported that his colleagues and he had narrowed down the possible culprits. Climate change and stormy spring weather, they said, may have transformed harmless bacteria, carried by the saigas, into lethal pathogens.”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saiga_antelope#2015–2016_epizootic …

      1 reply 1 retweet 4 likes
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 7
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      Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Matthew Pirkowski

      Don’t want to overstate/over fit the US origin of Spanish Flu theory. It’s not critical to the pattern. The bigger part is that the waxing global power supplies the new transportation network the disease rides, whatever the origin. https://twitter.com/mattpirkowski/status/1247745705881395202?s=21 …https://twitter.com/MattPirkowski/status/1247745705881395202 …

      Venkatesh Rao added,

      Matthew Pirkowski @MattPirkowski
      Replying to @vgr
      This is just one narrative amidst the research, and one that tends to be selected not b/c people want truth, but b/c they want a memetically potent take. After looking at the diff studies, my $ is on those that point to China, though it’s unlikely we’ll ever know definitively.
      1 reply 0 retweets 8 likes
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    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 7
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      In fact there’s a strong possibility all 3 big pandemivs (Black Death, Spanish Flu, Covid19) might have originated in China. But this is the first one where China *also* controls half the transportation pathways. Direct airline connectivity to China was the big dispersal factor.

      2 replies 0 retweets 8 likes
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    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 7
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      Counterfactual: if the virus had originated elsewhere, I bet the early dispersal hub would still likely have been China.

      2 replies 1 retweet 7 likes
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    10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 7
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      It’s important to be able to talk of origins dispassionately rather than at “your people gave my people cooties” level. Even if we can’t definitively trace origins especially in historic cases. It’s tempting but analytically a dead-end to study causes with an eye on blame.

      2 replies 1 retweet 10 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 7
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      Example: on Indian WhatsApp I’ve seen gloating fake claims that no pandemics have ever started in India, and that weird, dirty Chinese with their weird meats are to blame. Not true, lots of 19th century cholera outbreaks were from India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholera_outbreaks_and_pandemics …

      9:57 PM - 7 Apr 2020
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      • portalnyc Eduardo Ferraciolli Srinivas Raman Emperor Joshua Norton II Divia Eden VanDana
      2 replies 2 retweets 7 likes
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        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 7
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          Among recent epidemics, sources have been Hong Kong, Misdle East, West Africa. Only weird one I can think of from the west is mad cow disease but that had low crossover threat. Higher standard of living and lower density may lower chances of originating diseases, BUT...

          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 7
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          Keep in mind that western standards of living are sustained by: Asian manufacturing, middle eastern oil, and west African mineral wealth. Everybody is complicit. That’s the essence of globalization.

          1 reply 3 retweets 30 likes
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 7
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          If West Africa hadn’t been looted if it’s wealth by local warlords in cahoots with western MNCs, night it perhaps be a wakanda style paradise rather than the origin of AIDS and Ebola in recent decades? We don’t know because history never went down that fork.

          1 reply 1 retweet 9 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 7
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          MERS appears to have jumped the human-camel barrier but would that have been as consequential in a non-oil-dependent world?

          1 reply 1 retweet 4 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 7
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          So “cooties” approaches to big history thinking around pandemics is just not very enlightening or interesting. But globalization linkages otoh are very interesting. Pandemics as the cost of globalization. Payments due once a century or so.

          1 reply 2 retweets 11 likes
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 7
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          Pandemic-aware Big History probably needs the Harare/Sapiens treatment. Maybe even Gladwell or Tom Friedman level. There’s a pop-narrative vacuum here that’s being filled by the least charitable speculations rather than the most enlightening.

          1 reply 2 retweets 5 likes
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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 7
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          I generally don’t enjoy that band of authors for their shallow/facile theorizing but I have to admit: they provide a valuable service creating Schelling points of understanding founded in curiosity rather than fear.

          1 reply 1 retweet 8 likes
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        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 7
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          And it’s important to reorient around curiosity rather than fear as we come out of this, so the response to the next one — and there will be a next one — is better. Which kind of Big History you entertain now will determine whether you’re part of the problem or solution next time

          2 replies 2 retweets 9 likes
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        10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 7
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          This might sound like elliptical apologia for China at a time when Trump is going his usual crude demonizing to create convenient enemies. That’s not my intent.

          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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        11. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 7
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          China can and should be held to account for its role here. So should the WHO for their failures. But by credible people carefully considering what happened. Not by the kangaroo court if Trumpist opinion.

          1 reply 1 retweet 10 likes
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        12. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 7
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          Between global scrutiny and China’s own tendency towards acting out of national face-saving, proximal causes like wild animal interfaces will likely get fixed. WHO will probably see some reform. That’s band-aid stuff for the global order.

          1 reply 1 retweet 4 likes
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        13. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 7
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          But deeper root-cause fixes will come from a deeper intellectual understanding of how waves of globalization happen, what the costs are, how they are paid. These things take time. We’re still not done litigating the costs of the rise of the US a century ago.

          1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
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        14. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 7
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          China now joins an elite club of superpowers by virtue of being attributed responsibility for a Big Bad thing. Sinification will join Americanization as a decidedly mixed blessing spreading across the world. We’ll be in this story for a long time. Settle in.

          1 reply 1 retweet 12 likes
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        15. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 7
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          Reflecting on this stuff is giving me a deeper appreciation of what cosmopolitanism actually is. It’s not jetsetting or invites to Davos or crap like that. It’s about discovering a real humanism by discovering all the real humans. Not armchair values.

          2 replies 2 retweets 20 likes
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        16. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 7
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          I last wrote about this in 2016. My cartoon was a Zoom screen! Still an unrepentant globalist, and will be one even if none of us leave our homes again ever. You can take the globalist out of the world, but not the world out of the globalist.https://breakingsmart.substack.com/p/cosmopolitanism-its-a-beautiful-thing …

          2 replies 2 retweets 12 likes
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        17. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 7
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          Venkatesh Rao Retweeted ∆dish

          I am possibly wrong on the specific example of Cholera, though I’m skeptical of any definitive theories of historical cases. We just don’t have enough of a historical record.https://twitter.com/adish_war/status/1247766675295850496?s=21 …

          Venkatesh Rao added,

          ∆dish @CodeOfVasuki
          Replying to @vgr
          The claim that no pandemics have started in India is true. The Cholera pandemic of 1817 didn't start in India but was carried to India via European troops posted in Calcutta. Have a look at this thread: https://twitter.com/TIinExile/status/1243503322704871425?s=20 …
          2 replies 0 retweets 5 likes
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        18. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 7
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          The general parsimonious position I’ll defend is that it is statistics highly unlikely that large populations with a long history have miraculously never produced a pandemic. Every sufficiently populated region has probably produced a few.

          2 replies 0 retweets 5 likes
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        19. End of conversation

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