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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

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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 28
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      I’m learning this the hard way with the @yak_collective Some projects I’d take to that consulting collective hive-mind, others I’d do by myself. Very different challenges. Same with money. Distributed investing is very hard. This is why passive investment in everything works.

      1 reply 0 retweets 17 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 28
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      Venkatesh Rao Retweeted

      This tldrs the whole thread so far 😂 https://twitter.com/jimyoull/status/1277286206997327872?s=21 … https://twitter.com/JimYoull/status/1277286206997327872 …

      Venkatesh Rao added,

      This Tweet is unavailable.
      4 replies 1 retweet 24 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 28
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      You can’t fix the problems of markets and capitalism by changing who gets to be stupid and uninterested in the details of where it goes. Smart money is simply money that is paying attention to what it is doing. No matter what the mechanism and who is investing, attention is key.

      3 replies 5 retweets 43 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 28
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      Radical thought: centrally planned Soviet communism and Chinese capitalism aren’t actually that different from Western markets. All suffer from the exact same divorce between invest (1) and invest (2) leading to dumb ADD money. They all just have different externalities.

      2 replies 2 retweets 37 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 28
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      You could actually construct a Dictator’s Handbook style grand unified model comparing all three consistently. Selectorate theory can compare the substance of governance systems while ignoring their formal doctrinal differences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectorate_theory …

      1 reply 1 retweet 24 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 28
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      In that theory you compare democracies and dictatorships in terms of 3 groups: nominal selectorate, real selectorate, winning coalition. Aka interchangeables, influentials, essentials. In my economic theory: passive investors, investor-2s, investor-1s.pic.twitter.com/rdATzMrFmu

      3 replies 1 retweet 19 likes
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 28
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      USSR, modern China, and modern West represent differences in degree, not kind. All 3 are just different points in the 3D vector space of investor-selectorate theory. For USSR, Spufford’s Red Plenty comes highly recommended. I’ve read summaries.https://www.amazon.com/Red-Plenty-Francis-Spufford/dp/1555976042 …

      4 replies 0 retweets 18 likes
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    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 28
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      Okay, after a run and a shower, I have more to say. I probably have among the biggest income source spans on the planet. I’ve been paid directly by billionaires and centimillionaires for consulting, and by starving artists who can barely make rent via newsletter subs/ebook buys

      1 reply 0 retweets 21 likes
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    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 28
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      This makes me part of the direct service class, not that different from butlers or restaurant waiters. Bridging two very different worlds. Each side unconsciously tries really hard to avoid direct, humanizing contact with the other.

      1 reply 0 retweets 12 likes
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    10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 28
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      There is a motivated interest in doing this. Humanizing contact falsifies glib generalizations like “the poor are just lazy” or “the rich are just venal” and class-based theories of how things fail. This allows them to blame absolutely everything systemically wrong on other side.

      1 reply 0 retweets 21 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 28
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      On both sides I listen more than I talk (which may seem impossible to some who complain that I talk too much), while making it clear that the counterparty should not assume my sympathies. One way or another I’m being paid to think on their behalf, not commiserate. Like a lawyer.

      11:43 AM - 28 Jun 2020
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      • Dorian Taylor Malcolm is back by the 🌎cean! Cursion Vrushali Desai CreateAccYour Black Pluto Jdub The Legendary Dragon Alephwyr, named Alephwyr, BA Paulo Silveira
      1 reply 0 retweets 16 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 28
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          To both sides I’m slightly suspect. The poor are suspicious of my work with the rich, and I’m often accused outright of being a petit bourgeoisie capitalist shill. Which is 100% true. Equally the rich often suggest I’m a commie in bourgeois disguise. Also 100% true.

          2 replies 1 retweet 25 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 28
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          The opposite of every great truth is also a great truth. The poor are exploited. True. The poor are ressentiment driven identitarians who may or may not work hard. Also true. The rich are lazy venal rentiers. True. The rich are burdened with large responsibilities. Also true.

          1 reply 0 retweets 33 likes
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 28
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          This is class-based bothsidesism of course, which is why the worst of both sides are the ones who hate people like me the most (“vertical centrists” perhaps?). But for every systemic failure theres plenty of blame to distribute from top to bottom of pyramid.

          1 reply 0 retweets 18 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 28
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          Every class is complicit in how the world works. Every class has its full complement of sociopaths, clueless and losers. Every class has lazy and hard working types. Every class has people with fixed and fluid class identities. It’s a fractal thing.

          1 reply 1 retweet 29 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 28
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          Despite the fact that rewards of the system working are very unevenly distributed, ironically, every class winning or losing in terms of rewards seems super attached to the identities that keep the system the same. They want more rewards, but don’t want to change their identities

          1 reply 0 retweets 17 likes
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 28
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          To bring it back around to investing, there is investing in *yourself* to consider. Self-Investors (1) invest in their own growth, destroying last identities to forge new ones. Self-Investors (2) double down harder and harder on who they think they are.

          1 reply 3 retweets 33 likes
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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 28
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          There’s also Self-Investors 1.5. People who “grow” in a limited way reducible to class mobility. Start rich, fall into poverty and go commie. Start poor, get rich, and go capitalist. They say you’re the mean of your 5 best friends. These class-movers just change their 5. 🙄

          2 replies 0 retweets 17 likes
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        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 28
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          In Great Tuth terms, these 1.5ers never achieve any sort of integration between opposed great truths. They just go from one great truth to its negation, by cherrypicking a different subset of confirmatory evidence from their experiences.

          1 reply 0 retweets 13 likes
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        10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 28
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          There’s a behavior I call default-stereotype switching. Going socialist to capitalist? Switch poor-default from the suffering, exploited people you know to the resentful lazy ones. Going the other way? Switch rich-default from generous entrepreneur to Wall Street scammer.

          1 reply 0 retweets 12 likes
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        11. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 28
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          So long as you don’t pop out of the class-mobility identity ladder entirely, and drop class-based defaults of admiration and contempt for individuals, you’re part of the problem. Which is fine. It’s not a shaming. It means you’ll be manipulated as interchangeable passives.

          1 reply 1 retweet 16 likes
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        12. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 28
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          Not a coincidence: every single time anyone has strongly criticized me for my values, politics, or aesthetics (usually lack thereof), when I look, there’s a strong, hardened class identity behind it (this is not true of competence/skill/ignorance criticisms, which I appreciate)

          1 reply 1 retweet 18 likes
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        13. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 28
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          I’m pretty bourgeois. Petit, not haute. It’s traditionallly been the least admired class, inviting the most contempt. The identitarian poor see it as a snobbish climber class. The identitarian rich see it as a gauche not-even-new-money class. It is the most fluid-identity class.

          1 reply 1 retweet 23 likes
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        14. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 28
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          The upside of being in maximal contempt zone is that it is the zone where it is most difficult to harden an identity. There are no bourgeois manifestos or middle-class ideological tracts *for the bourgeois*, despite this being the class that writes these things for other classes

          2 replies 0 retweets 25 likes
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        15. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 28
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          Writing *about* the petit bourgeois is almost universally unsympathetic. Much of it by members of the class themselves, via ritual self-flagellation. This is the world of Babbitts and Karens. They are portrayed as standing for nothing except their own comfort and convenience.

          2 replies 0 retweets 11 likes
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        16. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 28
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          But middle-class societies tend also to be the ones in which human nature evolves fastest, through identity creative-destruction, as tidal forces of contempt from above and below tear apart and reconstitute the class, every generation. They also staff the investor (1) world.

          1 reply 0 retweets 10 likes
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        17. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 28
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          Rich and poor usually don’t change and don’t want to change. They have stable identities they aspire to, conform to, and then cling to with hardened determination. The petit bourgeois middle class doesn’t have this psychological luxury. It evolves as a series of tropes and memes.

          1 reply 0 retweets 15 likes
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        18. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 28
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          I don’t mind this. I’m fine with my life story being a series of bad memes that don’t cohere. Wojack today, Karen tomorrow. Neither world-denting Straussian-Girardian hero n or working class hero. Maybe I’ll title my autobiography “Glub and brrr: the story of a series of memes”

          1 reply 0 retweets 12 likes
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        19. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 28
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          Positive archetypes are for people who live on maps. Investor (2) types, whether they invest with money or hardened self-congratulatory class identities that make growth an imperative for everybody but themselves. The price of living on the territory is being reduced to a meme.

          1 reply 1 retweet 6 likes
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        20. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 28
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          I’ll stop here though I could go on. If you’re interested in this line of thought, I’m mainly developing it in my Great Weirding essay series on @breaking_smart This thread is kinda my starter assumptions for that, though I’ve never laid it out like thishttps://breakingsmart.com/en/the-great-weirding/ …

          1 reply 1 retweet 16 likes
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        21. End of conversation

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