Venkatesh Rao

Says something about the depth of positive potential in this country that despite 4 years of Trump and the prospect of 4 more, I don’t share this sentiment. The US is falling shockingly fast, but from a startlingly high position.

Despite the current anti-immigrant mood, it’s still actually the place I feel most welcome. The ethnonationalist turn of the US feels extra shocking because “native” is still an extremely unnatural construct here. Everywhere else, nativism is a deeper and more unwelcoming idea.

In absolute terms life here sucks right now. I detest the government, this state is burning, culture war is taking over everything, tech is stagnating... but when I ask, where else *could* I go with better overall prospects, there’s basically no other country on the list.

A ton of places have fewer negatives, but basically no place has significant positives that are available to me. Many places would be much nicer if I were much richer and the barriers to getting in were much lower.

Perhaps the view looks different if you already have a legal+linguistic foothold in a rich European or Asian country.

There’s still enough of value in this country that it’s a no-brainer that it’s worth saving from Trumpies. If he gets 4 more years, and/or Congress remains deadlocked, I don’t know if that will still be true in 2024. His damage capacity will 3x if he stays.

What’s valuable about the US? The story of how the hacker revolution grew out of the railroad modeling club at MIT gets at it. There were 2 groups there in the 1960s. One focused on aesthetics, accurate train models, landscapes, etc. Other was into railroads as “systems”.

The hacker revolution grew out of the second group, who jumped on the early computers. Seems like an allegory about America to me. The aesthetics modelers were like Trumpies. Invested in appearances and symbols/signifiers. The systems people were invested in how it all worked.

What makes America great is that there’s a continuous history of people constantly a) probing how the country works and b) taking it apart and rebuilding it in new ways, without being caught up in past. That’s why it’s been able to constantly reinvent itself over 500 years.

Such a group exists in all countries, but the difference is, they actually used to run the show in the US. In most countries, the analytical hackers are a tiny minority and have zero power. What’s depressing about Trumpies is that they make this country exactly like all others.

Ironic but not. The slogan “Make America Great Again” gives it away. America never does the same kind of greatness twice in a row. It’s always a self-disruption. That’s the actual exceptionalism of the US, but it’s the most terrifying exceptionalism for nativists to embrace.

I do believe some Trumpies believe the slogan sincerely. I just don’t think they get how this country works. They’re like the aesthetics-modelers of railroads in the MIT hacker culture story. They couldn’t see the soul of a computer revolution within the railroad revolution.

Foreigners often take note of how young this nation is, in post-Colombian accounting. But it’s not really. 528 years is a LONG time. The actual genius of this nat is staying young in spirit despite age. It’s always Day 1. It’s a 528 year old that acts like a 50-year-old.

Thought: The US is perhaps the only country where I feel both comfortable and justified in challenging native-borns’ right to judge who’s a “real” American. Even when their judgment is flattering as in, “you’ve become really American, not like some of those other immigrants”

I don’t feel that because I’ve now spent ~23 years here and seen/learned more about this country than many born here. I felt that way even 2-3 years in, when talking to say 50-year old native-borns. I don’t think I’d be this way after say 23 years in Japan or France.

This may seem hypocritical, but even being an expat for that long, I probably wouldn’t reciprocally recognize Indianness of immigrants who’ve spent longer than me there. It’s the uniqueness of the idea of the US. There’s no naturally privileged definition of “American.”

The correct American response to remarks like “you’ve become really American, not like some of those other immigrants” is “wtf makes you the judge of that?” “American” unlike any other national identity, is almost like PageRank, an identity born of mutuality of recognition.

Other identities are kinda essentialist whether you like it or not. Much as I detest the Hindutva brigade in Modi’s India, it’s harder to challenge their claim to primacy in defining the idea of India and Indianness, because there isn’t a robust non-reactionary alternative basis.

The genius of the US is that if you can grok the way the machine works, hack it for your own idea of your best life (aka “the American dream”), and remake the country itself in a small way in doing so, that *is* how you earn an American identity.

If you make the mistake of thinking it’s about being born here, and about cowboy hats, guns, garage startups, country music, rock, black culture, or any other absolute signifier, there’s a very good chance you’ll end up being more Russian than American.