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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 Aug 19
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      Left to itself, for example, if "make your own breakfast burritos" is one of the big shifts, will not bootstrap into a new supply chain for burritos. It will take higher level more deliberate actions like an entrepreneur recognizing it and (for eg) starting a meal-kit business.

      2 replies 0 retweets 8 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 19
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      Stewart Brand pace layering idea is good here. The bottom layer has shifted. With different time constants everything above it will shift. Some shifts won't be complete for a decade or two.

      2 replies 1 retweet 13 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 19
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      Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Venkatesh Rao

      Some big second-level things already happening. Secular shift towards WFH for example, is a key enabler for locking in many of the new habits.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1296130746130653185 …

      Venkatesh Rao added,

      Venkatesh Rao @vgr
      Replying to @FredRKozlowski
      Remote work is here to stay to a much bigger degree than people realize. Many big companies have already announced permanent move in that direction. Many have already packed up and moved to entirely different cities as a result, burning their bridges for a daily commute...
      1 reply 0 retweets 15 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 19
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      Others have acquired weird new optionality and time constants. I now own hair clippers, and wife has mastered giving me a decent enough haircut that even if I go back to hair salons, it may be less frequent, and the option will last at least as long as the clippers.

      2 replies 0 retweets 13 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 19
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      And don't underestimate the factor that many people are having 3 simultaneous realizations: 1. There IS an alternative to X 2. They can master the skill for X 3. They actually like alt to X better Preferences are shifting, not just habits.

      1 reply 5 retweets 37 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 19
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      This particular effect has the psychological quality of dozens of small red pill/enlightenment moments in every lifestyle. It's not a single big false consciousness/learned helplessness pattern breaking down. It's a lot of little ones acting together.

      3 replies 0 retweets 8 likes
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 19
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      It's not scales falling from your eyes in one big Aha! moment where you jump up and yell "the premium mediocre lifestyle emperor has no clothes." It's more like lots of little nudges and shifts together knocking you into a new lifestyle equilibrium that is radically different.

      3 replies 1 retweet 9 likes
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    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 19
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      My buddy @keithmadams once called this "the unreasonable effectiveness of small optimizations" and that's what we're all doing right now. I wrote a newsletter about that idea several years ago. It's a very powerful ideahttps://breakingsmart.substack.com/p/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of …

      3 replies 3 retweets 39 likes
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    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 19
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      The biggest (and frankly, most exciting) aspect of this is that there is a secular "grain" to a LOT of the habit shifts that is already evident: away from consumer culture, and towards diy/maker/hacker/prosumer/producer culture. Also reuse, repair, repurpose, etc.

      1 reply 1 retweet 21 likes
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    10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 19
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      This is not being driven by sustainability and climate activists, or driven by concern for the the toxicity of consumer culture or the moral superiority of a stronger diy type culture. It's being driven by necessity, will stay out of preference, but will have a bigger effect.

      1 reply 0 retweets 15 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 19
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      The thing about all this diy stuff is that it shifts preferences at a hugely important meta-level: time vs. money and the quality of life equation.

      10:26 AM - 19 Aug 2020
      • 9 Likes
      • Rahul Ramchandani Herr Dr Mr Modern Major General brrr Seitz OTIS! Divia Eden Scott Slocum Death will not release you Olaf Peter Borah Alan Cooper
      1 reply 0 retweets 9 likes
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        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 19
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          When people discover that their time-money tradeoff curve has more elasticity than they thought, because new skills make the time-cost of things much lower, and supply chain vagaries make the time+money cost higher, preference for more money over more time shifts significantly.

          1 reply 0 retweets 11 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 19
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          This is the home edition of the build-vs-buy decision-making that all businesses are very familiar with. It is the consumerization of build-vs-buy decisions. For most people, for most kinds of domestic consumption, build-vs-buy decisions were not even available. You had to buy.

          2 replies 0 retweets 10 likes
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 19
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          So all the business process skills that businesses learned in the last 40 years -- outsourcing vs. insourcing, build vs. buy etc. and unwittingly taught a lot of their employees, are now being applied at scale in homes.

          2 replies 2 retweets 7 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 19
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          All these are kinda good from the pov of a lot of values/mission-driven perspectives (climate, sustainability, retreat from financial productivity/yield as the driving legible metric of the economy), but it is important to note that it doesn't actually "belong" to any mission.

          1 reply 0 retweets 8 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 19
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          So a key mistake you will be tempted to make is to interpret the shift through just one values lens. Do that and you'll be disappointed. Maybe 70% of the shift will align with climate action, but 30% won't and you'll be tempted to knee-jerk fight that or eliminate it as noise.

          2 replies 0 retweets 13 likes
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 19
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          The changes are at what I call the log level, and are a shift in phenomenology of lifestyle variety at population scale. Supervening narratives will necessarily reductive. The idea of supervenience is good to get comfortable with for thinking this through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervenience …

          1 reply 0 retweets 7 likes
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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 19
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          People's habits are changing --> their identities are changing --> how they fit into any story you craft will change

          4 replies 4 retweets 17 likes
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        9. End of conversation

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