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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 Sep 28
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      Big history whiplash is a thing. Staying inside the OODA loop of history tires you out. I think most people can navigate at most 3-4 of these big historical pivots before giving up and saying fuckit, I'm not changing anymore and let this kill me if I can't navigate it.

      1 reply 2 retweets 20 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 28
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      I'm at 3 now: internet, great weirding, covid. I have 1 more left in the tank, tops. After that I'm going krugman. I don't count 1989-91 because I was still in high school and I didn't really have to navigate it. That was for adults to do.

      3 replies 1 retweet 17 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 28
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      I have a fairly solid record of my own thinking through 2010-2014, since that coincides with my most steadily prolific output period on ribbonfarm. But there are no throughlines there that I can detect. There's like 4-5 branches of stuff.

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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 28
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      Heh, I should compile an ebook out of those years' archives titled "The Dead End Scrolls"

      1 reply 0 retweets 16 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 28
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      A very good test of narrative vigor for anything that's older than 10 years is whether it has a thread of narrative continuity through 2011-14 that does in fact continue uninterrupted through 2015-20 rather than being an abandoned dead end.

      2 replies 1 retweet 5 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 28
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      Two narratives that satisfy this criterion are Amazon and Elon Musk. And shocker, both also boast stocks flying high right now. Very few things can claim to have uninterrupted compounding value through the dead-end years, hedged across all futures.

      1 reply 0 retweets 17 likes
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 28
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      I honestly can't think of anything else that was *already* big ~2010 that has retained narrative momentum through that period and into the great weirding. There were tiny baby things in 2010 that got big and vigorous, and big and vigorous things that kinda just died.

      1 reply 1 retweet 9 likes
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    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 28
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      Like Obama hope train. That was HUGE through first term. But it represented a vein of moderate progressive hope that kinda just stopped dead and died. Sadly, the first black president will also be remembered as a dead-end president on an abandoned branch of history.

      1 reply 0 retweets 15 likes
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    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 28
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      Modern BLM-ish black politics took shape in the last years of his administration and is basically the most un-Obama thing ever. Sadly, his most direct impact on history will have been triggering the white reaction and helping directly create Trump with his standup set.

      2 replies 1 retweet 15 likes
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    10. Mads Imian‏ @madsimian Sep 28
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      Replying to @vgr

      You give Obama too much credit; the white reaction was active on day one. The petering out of his “hope” agenda is a function of how badly he and other progressive Democrats underestimated the potency of unvarnished racism as a political motivator. Trump brought the message home.

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 28
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      Replying to @madsimian

      perhaps

      11:51 AM - 28 Sep 2020
      0 replies 0 retweets 0 likes

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