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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 Jun 3
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      Anatole France quote that’s been on my mind a lot lately: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

      2 replies 25 retweets 102 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 3
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      I’m generally in favor of working to preserve existing institutions, but unlike most others who are also in favor of that, I’m under no illusions about any sort of divine moral legitimacy of those institutions, derived from constitutions, codes of law, or religions.

      1 reply 2 retweets 17 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 3
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      I’m primarily in favor of institutional stability because I’m deeply skeptical of burn-it-down ideas leading to improved new ones. They’ll simply put a new set of people on top/bottom. Absent genuine new knowledge to form a new basis, nothing really changes.

      10:14 PM - 3 Jun 2020
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      • too many lizards Pasayten Fol. foo Parse Olaf Bandeauxx. Rushi Roth
      3 replies 3 retweets 35 likes
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        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 3
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          When new institutions do better than the ones they replace it’s because they use some new technological capability to achieve fundamental new behaviors. Like printing press, steam, telegraph, radio. New “values” don’t drive change, they merely change who’s on top.

          1 reply 4 retweets 26 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 3
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          Which means, revolutionary institutional creative destruction without technological advance merely buys turn-taking on top at the cost of net, sharp wealth destruction each cycle. Worth it overall? Perhaps. It’s fair in a negative sum way.

          2 replies 1 retweet 9 likes
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 3
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          I operate on the dangerous assumption that I’ll always be in the middle, no matter how much top and bottom trade places. Top and bottom are about the history of power, the middle is about the future of information.

          1 reply 1 retweet 16 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 3
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          “Values” people advocating a tear-down-build-new approach with zero interest in, or understanding of, the role of technology in institutional evolution (even as they rant at tech, while piously tweeting phone videos, oblivious to irony) angry up my blood.pic.twitter.com/L69xDXNkpd

          1 reply 0 retweets 11 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 3
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          Even the ones who do vaguely realize that tech is what disrupts equilibriums giving them a new opportunity to pursue their agendas tend to not really get it. In the short term, politics is a values voting machine. In the long term it’s a technological weighing machine.

          1 reply 1 retweet 13 likes
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 3
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          The medium is the message. The medium is the mission. Medium statements eat mission statements for lunch. The winning ideology that gets to construct new power landscapes is the one that most fully embodies the medium.

          2 replies 0 retweets 21 likes
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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 3
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          Capitalism beat communism not because it had better values but because it better embodied the message of the medium: mass production with interchangeable parts. The winner out of 2020 will be whatever best embodies the spirit of software/mobile phones. Sneer at your own peril.

          4 replies 5 retweets 40 likes
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        9. End of conversation
        1. Andrew Ishimaru ©‏ @AndrewIshimaru Jun 4
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          I like the concept of split testing institutions, however that might work

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        1. Adam Ahmed‏ @hitsthings Jun 4
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          I think to form new knowledge you have to experiment. Burn-it-down is an extreme version, but ideally there's a middle ground where we do much more experimentation than we currently do in as harmless ways as possible. We certainly need _something_ to change.

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