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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 30
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      I think I’m circling a concept you could call stack survivalism, as opposed to regular fully off-grid survivalism. Where you plan against scenarios of various sorts of non-robustness and jankiness rather than full-on, theatrical charismatic megacollapse.

      16 replies 34 retweets 275 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 30
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      (like “things ordered from China not getting through” or “rolling blackouts” or “toilet paper shortage”) The stack is far more robust that collapsniks secretly hope it is, but far less robust than “this is fine” denialosts/normalcy larpers.

      3:56 PM - 30 Aug 2020
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      • __Honestdave Ra’s Al Ghul, Venture Capitalist Basil Marte Tao Teg Paula Lanksy Adam Gravois Jake Emma 🍵 Benjamin Bratton
      2 replies 1 retweet 73 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 30
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          Early Covid was very revealing: in a crisis, you need time more than money, and ability to get things done in ways besides paying for them. Like being on twitter and getting early warning to beat the stock-up rush by 2-4 weeks. Or having a 3D printer and able to print shields.

          2 replies 1 retweet 53 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 30
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          Regular prepping is like a mix of waterfall planning for a very specific scenario (Costco 5-year food supply pallet anyone?) and Soviet 5-year plan command ec0nomy mindset at first estimation scale. It is overkill in anything short of a sudden step-function overnight collapse.

          3 replies 0 retweets 38 likes
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 30
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          Stack survivalism is more like chaos monkey outages of random bits of the world you depend on. Some general principles have already become clear. For example: You are more vulnerable where you’re a corner case (eg: insulin supply, mask protocols for people who can’t wear masks)

          1 reply 3 retweets 46 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 30
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          Another is that days and weeks matter more than months and years. Over months and years, the stack reconfigures in unpredictable ways that you have to adapt to live, closed-loop, by improvising. But over days and weeks, your preparedness makes a bigger difference.

          1 reply 4 retweets 49 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 30
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          First few minutes: physical fitness First hour: grab bag First days: emergency supplies First weeks: flexible potential of your home base (eg: tool box) Months: active productive abilities (bread machine, 3D printer...) Years: skills in your head

          4 replies 4 retweets 60 likes
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 30
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          The stack is “normally” like 95% reliable. 2 sigma. Let’s say a level 1 crisis is where it drops to 68%. 1 sigma reliable. Or 1 in 3 routine actions is disrupted. You need stack observation capabilities customized to you, to monitor this percentage from your lifestyle POV.

          1 reply 1 retweet 24 likes
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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 30
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          The “news” is a model of situation awareness for an industrial world. 40y ago, your stack observation ability was: Daily newspaper/TV for “local” and “national” news Phone grapevine Step out in street and chat with neighbors Walk around neighborhood

          1 reply 1 retweet 17 likes
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        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 30
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          It was an environment of low variance in both individual needs and abilities to prepare. Now both have become very high variance. AND these traditional sources of sigint have become very noisy. By the time a signal gets to them, it’s either too late, or the get it wrong.

          1 reply 0 retweets 17 likes
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        10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 30
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          Now besides social media, there’s a lot more you could do. For example: monitor a basket of goods on Amazon for stock-outs. People already do this to track sales/discounts. Why not crisis early warning? State of the art: walk to local supermarket and check toilet paper level 🙄

          3 replies 0 retweets 31 likes
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        11. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 30
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          Also more physical instrumentation. Those with air quality sensors can respond more individually to forest-fire and pollution risks. Those with oximeters can manage Covid risk better. U. Arizona caught a Covid outbreak early with sewage monitoring (shows up early in stool)

          3 replies 0 retweets 26 likes
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        12. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 30
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          That last one reveals a specific weakness in normal prepper mindset. If you only have a nuclear option of fleeing to your cabin, bunker, or New Zealand mansion, you’re not ready for milder crises where that’s an over-reaction. Apartment buildings with shared sewage surveillance?

          1 reply 0 retweets 23 likes
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        13. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 30
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          Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Venkatesh Rao

          Autocorrect typo: first estimation = domestic 🥴https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1300207171628490753 …

          Venkatesh Rao added,

          Venkatesh Rao @vgr
          Regular prepping is like a mix of waterfall planning for a very specific scenario (Costco 5-year food supply pallet anyone?) and Soviet 5-year plan command ec0nomy mindset at first estimation scale. It is overkill in anything short of a sudden step-function overnight collapse.
          Show this thread
          1 reply 0 retweets 8 likes
          Show this thread
        14. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 30
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          I think you could sort survivalist postures by locus of self-preservation concerns. The hard-preppers are me-and-my-family sovereign individual types. Everybody else in trade-or-fight zone. This affects their planning. For example undervaluing shared risk mitigation tactics.

          1 reply 0 retweets 19 likes
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        15. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 30
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          At the other extreme, it’s the communitarian survivalists. “We’re all in this together, no matter what.” This has its own blindspots, like the practically existing levels of trust and alignment, variance in needs and abilities, level of endemic strife.

          1 reply 0 retweets 18 likes
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        16. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 30
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          Problem with both extremes is that posture towards others becomes a matter of values rather than empirical judgment. Which requires observation capabilities throughout the stack. If you can measure the right things, your approach needn’t have a libertarian or socialist flavor.

          1 reply 0 retweets 18 likes
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        17. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 30
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          You can adapt to actual social conditions rather than theoretical. Your prepping model need not have Hobbesian or Rousseauean priors that haven’t been updated since 1800. You can construct state based on today.

          1 reply 0 retweets 17 likes
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        18. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 30
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          Live example: Portland shitshow related stuff already appears to have caused some smaller incidents here in LA. How to respond? Monitor on Twitter? Rush out for more toilet paper? Run around looking for open gun store? Look for cabin in woods on Airbnb?

          1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
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        19. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 30
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          The better your stack instrumentation, the more calibrated and continuous your response can be.

          2 replies 0 retweets 16 likes
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        20. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 30
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          What we’ve learned from Covid is that the right assumption is continuous partial collapse, not rare binary state changes. And your response likewise should be continuous partial resiliency tuning, not a two-state switching curve between full-blown lockdown mindset and normalcy.

          1 reply 7 retweets 62 likes
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        21. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 30
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          Pre-enacting the coming gradually darkening ages for fun and profit. Buy my teachable course “stack survivalism 101”

          1 reply 0 retweets 13 likes
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        22. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 30
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          Venkatesh Rao Retweeted T

          Yep this is ithttps://twitter.com/meanderingexile/status/1300229349820362752 …

          Venkatesh Rao added,

          T @meanderingexile
          Replying to @vgr
          I've been feeling something similar lately, so it's interesting to hear you put it into words. It's hard psychologically, because you accept the survivalist premise ("the system is on the brink") but reject the survivalist fantasy that this will make life simple and genuine
          1 reply 0 retweets 13 likes
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        23. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 30
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          Venkatesh Rao Retweeted T

          Amenhttps://twitter.com/meanderingexile/status/1300230320160038912 …

          Venkatesh Rao added,

          T @meanderingexile
          Replying to @meanderingexile @vgr
          instead of Zombieland's freedom or Tyler Durden's primitivism, you get some weirding nightmare where you're purifying your own water but still have to worry about office politics, getting into Route Irish-style gun battles on the way home while dodging robocalls from the IRS
          1 reply 1 retweet 22 likes
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        24. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 30
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          There’s also similarities to a cold war condition between you and the world. It’s a backdrop of tension that may get to you anytime, but if it not, you can continue in surreal normalcy. Like the Cold War was just normalcy with a side of polonium-tip umbrella assassinations.

          1 reply 0 retweets 17 likes
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        25. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 30
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          There’s surprising similarities between stack survivalism and gig economy career management. Pragmatic prepping is a series of life gigs rather than work gigs. Transition from ordinary life to continuous partial collapse life is a bit like transition from paycheck to gig life.

          1 reply 0 retweets 20 likes
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        26. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 30
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          In the gig economy, you see surge pricing coming, and you go live. In stack survivalist living you see a toilet paper outage coming and you stock up.

          1 reply 1 retweet 14 likes
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        27. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 30
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          I wonder how many people with bunkers are pissed that things are bad but not bad enough to retreat to bunkers. If I had a bunker I think I’d unconsciously be hoping for a chance to use it. And kinda hoping for the Real Thing™ instead of just a bunch of stock-outs and slow mail.

          1 reply 0 retweets 28 likes
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        28. End of conversation

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