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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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    Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 16
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    I used to think the protection racket side of woke was about targeting HR for diversity training grifts. Now I think it’s about control of PR boilerplate language to accumulate social media capital. In either case actually improving employment diversity is not the goal.

    8:22 AM - 16 Aug 2020
    • 28 Retweets
    • 186 Likes
    • Simon Tegg Reacher!💥 Raj Balakrishnan Kris Karzy Catarina Maia erica robles-anderson Bewildered Bear Tom VanAntwerp wears a mask and you should too. A common lawyer
    9 replies 28 retweets 186 likes
      1. New conversation
      2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 16
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        If you actually wanted to create opportunities for under-represented groups, this stuff is obviously counterproductive. Any member of such a group who lands a job despite the grift theater now has extra mistrust to overcome. The grifts impose a tax on those it claims to represent

        3 replies 6 retweets 77 likes
        Show this thread
      3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 16
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        The PR tack is clear if you look at the language game: traditional corporate boilerplate is replaced with woke boilerplate. In either case, no actual humans talk like that, so everybody gets that what’s being communicated is an institutional posture, not an individual one.

        1 reply 3 retweets 62 likes
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      4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 16
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        So by forcing orgs to talk in woke boilerplate instead of regular boilerplate, the grifts accumulate a sort of media capital. Orgs are muzzled because their usual ways of saying what they routinely need to say no longer work.

        1 reply 4 retweets 40 likes
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      5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 16
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        What they do say under the coercion of the grifts doesn’t serve either their own existing needs, or thise of underrepresented groups. So their own communications go underground to other channels. Corporate media channels essentially become co-opted into the propaganda apparatus.

        1 reply 3 retweets 36 likes
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      6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 16
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        Of course this only works for as long as orgs continue to foolishly try to use public media channels for ordinary business functions like sales, marketing, recruitment. The attack surface for political/media careerism only exists as long as PR as a function itself does.

        1 reply 1 retweet 26 likes
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      7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 16
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        Remember PR stands for “public relations.” It only makes sense so long as orgs can actually relate to the “public” at large, without interference from intercessionary actors claiming representation monopolies via whatever logic (intersectional in this case)

        1 reply 0 retweets 21 likes
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      8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 16
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        For all its parody-worthy stiltedness, traditional PR boilerplate was a direct line of communication between orgs and public. The orgs knew how to produce it with a straight face, the public knew how to decode it while making their jokes and laughing at the cringe. It worked.

        1 reply 1 retweet 29 likes
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      9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 16
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        The woke boilerplate works too. Just not for the same parties — orgs and the public. It only works to consolidate media capital for grifters, and further their careers within it. It doesn’t reform HR, improve diversity in hiring, or lead to diverse voices actually being heard.

        1 reply 5 retweets 32 likes
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      10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 16
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        There’s a definition of journalism: “Printing something somebody doesn’t want printed. Everything else is PR.” The cooption of corporate PR mechanisms into a woke propaganda apparatus is a kind of antijournalism: silencing orgs where they do need to say things.

        1 reply 4 retweets 41 likes
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      11. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 16
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        Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Venkatesh Rao

        The economic opportunity in targeting PR is >> targeting HR because the risk of actually killing the host is much higher with HR. To hit HR sustainably you have to actually want to solve the problem you claim to be addressing. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1295026956681932801?s=21 …https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1295026956681932801 …

        Venkatesh Rao added,

        Venkatesh Rao @vgr
        Replying to @zenpundit
        I think it’s mainly PR now because the market for HR workshop grifts is both limited and already saturated, and more seriously, actually threatens to kill the host. It’s a way to milk the orgs indefinitely without killing them.
        1 reply 0 retweets 18 likes
        Show this thread
      12. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 16
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        I’m usually wary of criticizing woke from my left-of-center position because it risks creating an opening for pwnage by the right. In this case, I think it’s relatively safe because the right sucks at this class of grift. They’d pwn Corp HR and PR if they could.

        1 reply 1 retweet 28 likes
        Show this thread
      13. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 16
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        The right currently prefers to pursue grift intentions in the corporate world diffferently, at the cronyism level of the game involving government bailouts/subsidies for execs/owners, and sectoral tariffs. The left sucks at that game. Each side has carved out its parasitic niche.

        1 reply 1 retweet 30 likes
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      14. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 16
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        As a minority, but with sharply limited intersectional klout (straight brown-Asian immigrant male non-aspie techie is worth say 3.5/10 points in the oppression hierarchy, where straight white male would be 0.5/10), my n=1 case is not worth much but...

        1 reply 1 retweet 27 likes
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      15. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 16
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        ... personally I have more than one episode in my personal history of firmly rejecting grifters trying to “represent” me. This does not mean I haven’t benefitted from thoughtful individual and institutional efforts, both one-off and structural, to benefit classes I’m part of.

        2 replies 0 retweets 22 likes
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      16. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 16
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        I have zero illusions about the history of this country or how people who looked like me were treated even a few decades ago. I have zero illusions about what colonial rule in India was like and what atrocities it perpetuated. There are real legitimate political aims here.

        1 reply 0 retweets 30 likes
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      17. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 16
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        Decolonizing minds is a real need. Activism in history made real gains. Civil rights pioneers made real sacrifices and scored real victories against human monstrousness. Making the economy more representative of the population is a genuine need. Hiring and education must evolve.

        1 reply 4 retweets 49 likes
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      18. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 16
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        But grifter bullshit that plants and detonates toxic mistrust bombs in the economic engine not only serves none of these aims, it actively works against them. While also destroying the hard-won legacies of past social justice revolutionaries.

        1 reply 6 retweets 51 likes
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      19. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 16
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        How do you actually make continued gains in the story of “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” The arc doesn’t bend itself. It’s like Moore’s law. Beneath the natural seeming trajectory there’s very strenuous active human effort.

        2 replies 3 retweets 46 likes
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      20. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 16
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        With Moore’s law, the 18-month doubling period of transistor density wasn’t a natural law. Every few years techies had to rethink large parts of the semiconductor stack to keep making the gains. The tricks that worked in 1970 ran out of juice by 1980 and new tricks were needed.

        3 replies 2 retweets 30 likes
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      21. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 16
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        The “arc of the moral universe” has had a huge number of diverse actors curving it over centuries. Royal-born Buddha 2500y ago, religious leaders like John Wyclif in Europe in pre-modern times, Gandhi in the 1910s-30s, black leaders 1950s-70s... each pioneered new tactics/models

        1 reply 0 retweets 21 likes
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      22. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 16
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        2020 is no different. It needs a new playbook. But it also needs the same old sincerity of purpose alloyed with deep self-awareness, critical self-scrutiny, systematic doubt, compassion even for the adversary/oppressor. The privilege of bending the arc is hard-earned.

        3 replies 4 retweets 43 likes
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      23. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 16
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        Changing history does not come cheap. You have to destroy and recreate yourself. The personal histories of past social justice leaders makes that much clear. They were *far* harder on themselves in pursuit of inner growth than they were on those they fought or the world at large.

        1 reply 2 retweets 30 likes
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      24. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 16
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        I personally am not a huge fan of Gandhi. I think he got lots of things wrong intellectually, philosophically, and morally. But damn the man made sacrifices and lived his “experiments with truth” in extreme ways. I couldn’t put myself through a fraction of it. Gotta respect it.

        2 replies 2 retweets 31 likes
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      25. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 16
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        That phrase is important. If your social justice work isn’t a set of real, rigorous “experiments with truth” (Gandhi’s autobiography title, in case you don’t recognize the phrase, one of the few books in the literature I’ve read), you are not bending the arc. You’re grifting.

        2 replies 7 retweets 33 likes
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      26. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 16
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        Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Venkatesh Rao

        Gandhi stub. I don’t want to overstate his role in the global story here. He’s just a key reference point for me personally for obvious reasons. To be Indian you have to sort out how you feel about Gandhi, just as you have to do that re MLK if you’re black https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1295040796593283072?s=21 …https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1295040796593283072 …

        Venkatesh Rao added,

        Venkatesh Rao @vgr
        Replying to @Visage_1
        Long story for another time. It’s mostly dead history at this point so not that consequential anymore. Net, his contribution to both Indian history and the global history of social justice was a positive one. The critical take diesnt change that.
        1 reply 0 retweets 13 likes
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      27. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 16
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        While we’re on the subject, most stuff expected of white people like the white fragility book, is bullshit. Probably the biggest thing for white people to do is realize that these battles that are live ones for many groups, are deep in the past of European history for you.

        1 reply 4 retweets 36 likes
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      28. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 16
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        To the extent you can unconsciously enjoy many freedoms others must consciously craft, that ability rests on battles fought hundreds of years ago for you. There are basically no groups currently living that did not at some point in the past have to fight for justice.

        2 replies 4 retweets 32 likes
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      29. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 16
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        Social justice is not a minority story. It’s a universal story. All humans must at some point fight for justice because all humans are capable of being monstrously unjust to others. It’s the same fight. The fight against monsters includes the fight against your inner monster.

        1 reply 8 retweets 67 likes
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      30. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 16
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        This is the meaning of “nobody is free until everybody is free.” The hard part is recognizing that this is not just something to preach at the currently privileged, oblivious of the poisons in their freedoms. It’s a call for the currently oppressed to face their inner monsters.

        4 replies 3 retweets 42 likes
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      31. End of conversation

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