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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 Nov 4
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      Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Venkatesh Rao

      This QT is my election livetweet thread. Now that things are winding down into a tight endgame with a cloud of murky lawsuits and doubt-merchanting hanging over them... I hereby declare the excruciating lessons learned meta-thread open. Muahahahaha.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1323779406750314496 …

      Venkatesh Rao added,

      Venkatesh Rao @vgr
      And... we’re off. Indiana called for Trump. Doomscrollers, start your engines.
      Show this thread
      2 replies 3 retweets 40 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 4
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      Note that lessons are the same no matter who wins (and I’ve already teased many of them in the livetweet thread), but the futures are not. A 4-year rearguard Biden presidency would open up counter reformation futures a second Trump term would foreclose. Huge divergent fork here.

      3:03 PM - 4 Nov 2020
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      • James Giammona Scott's 250 bartender of weird Spencer Weston nlk Curtis Martin Tománek ☘️🎃 Kevin Merlini
      2 replies 0 retweets 20 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 4
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          I’ll run this thread at a slower tempo over weeks/months, unlike the quoted live-tweet thread which is live impressionistic daubs. Not quite cold takes, but not hot either. More like tepid takes. Feel free to shoot good postmortem links my way to react to.

          2 replies 0 retweets 11 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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          Lemme index a few topics here for future processing: 1. The charge that Trump was the victim of "unfair" double standards throughout his admin 2. The idea that his loyalty-based appointments and purges are the same thing as the detrumpification that will inevitably happen now.

          2 replies 0 retweets 17 likes
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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          3. The idea that the collusion/interference investigation is on the same level as whatever conspiracy theories Trump unleashes about the legitimacy of this election. 4. The idea that Trump vandalizing of a whole slew of governance norms was either harmless or admirable cunning

          2 replies 0 retweets 13 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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          I'll just index a bunch of topics here, but might not opine on all of them. These are just themes/questions of Excruciating Lessons Learned that are occurring to me. If I see good threads by other people addressing them, I'll just link them here.

          2 replies 1 retweet 23 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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          5. Future of old media, especially its opinion section clickbaiting and its polling section? 6. Future of new media (facebook, twitter, 4chan...), which played a good Mini-Me to old media.

          2 replies 0 retweets 9 likes
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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          7. How should we think about instances of Trump doing what many who detest him felt was the right thing? Should it be regarded as simply "wrong person doing the right thing for the wrong reasons" as Milton Friedman put it, or should we look more skeptically at the "right thing"?

          1 reply 1 retweet 11 likes
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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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          8. If you believe, as I came to believe as early as July 2017 (6 months in, during the failed ACA “skinny repeal” attempt) that Trump regime was basically ransomware, how do you get it out and prevent future infections? https://breakingsmart.substack.com/p/malware-is-choking-the-world …pic.twitter.com/FS0cIQsNbs

          2 replies 3 retweets 18 likes
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        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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          One thing I want to do with this meta thread is not let my unabashed middle-class globalist bougie class snobbery color my cold takes too much. Yep, I’m probably part of the class demonized as “elites,” and do harbor some of the contempt Trumpies sense and react angrily to.

          1 reply 0 retweets 21 likes
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        10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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          But I do believe that when I factor all that out, as best I can, we are left with real moral culpability that’s not just a matter of class/culture prejudice. There are crimes against shared humanity here. Remember, plenty of poor working-class whites *didn’t* vote Trump in 2016.

          2 replies 3 retweets 27 likes
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        11. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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          Final meta point. Trump, despite being a rich, white, native-born, is an outsider lolcow in important circles where I, as foreign-born non-rich brown, am an insider. That this can be true is one of the deep, broad resentments Trump was a messenger for. Just acknowledging that.

          4 replies 5 retweets 57 likes
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        12. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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          9. To the extent this whole 4-year shitshow was enabled and given its specific 2016-20 shape and form by software eating old institutions, what should we take away in terms of what new software-aware institutions should look like? What’s the message of the medium?

          4 replies 3 retweets 17 likes
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        13. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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          10. This is basically a cope for poor Ben, but it does suggest a good question: what is the range of GOP presidents Dems would/should see as acceptable in future, even if distasteful? I’d have been 100% fine in 2016 with any of the other candidates, from Cruz to Jeb.pic.twitter.com/PJE584doXu

          9 replies 0 retweets 12 likes
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        14. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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          (which is not to say I’d have personally liked any of them, or agreed with their policies, esp in a counterfactual Cruz admin, but I’d have seen it as legit, and good-enough faith. And tbf I rather liked GWB though hard-left partisans hate him... in many ways I’m pretty old-GOP)

          4 replies 0 retweets 11 likes
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        15. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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          11. What price Bannon-Miller ethnonationalism (Trump is a lazy shallow racist, but these two were genuine Nazi-wannabe-ideologues) 12. What price protectionist economic nationalism? Is there a version that works in a liberal spirit or is it inseparable from ethnocentrism?

          4 replies 0 retweets 15 likes
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        16. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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          13. What about Bannon’s “dismantle the administrative state”? Is there a there there that’s in some sense a legit policy objective in the spirit of the better bits of deregulation a la Reaganomics? Or is it now impossible to disentangle from ethno-fascism-by-privatization?

          3 replies 0 retweets 11 likes
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        17. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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          14. For those who believe Trump represented a rare *qualitative* break from a ~250-year spirit of American public affairs rather than a difference in degree, what was the essence of that break, and what role does “his kind” (Nixon? Goldwater? Jackson?) deserve in public affairs?

          5 replies 1 retweet 8 likes
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        18. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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          Damn, I’m racking up the excruciating analysis questions here. 15. To what extent was the fear of a slide into naked authoritarianism (which people like @sarahkendzior kept up a relentless spotlight on) justified, and still requires attention/action?

          3 replies 0 retweets 10 likes
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        19. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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          16. We saw a long-nurtured apparatus produce fait-accompli outcomes in the judiciary: the Federalist society had a mission accomplished moment under Trump. What did we learn? 17. What enabling archetypes besides Trump emerged as important? McConnell, Bannon, Miller... who else?

          2 replies 0 retweets 10 likes
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        20. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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          18. China relations are probably the only area where even Trump haters like me would be willing to concede he accomplished something: a reset in an unsatisfactory 2015 equilibrium. What did he accomplish and at what cost? What parts are worth keeping? What costs need addressing?

          4 replies 0 retweets 12 likes
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        21. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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          19. What did Woke/SJW learn? What did we learn about it? Where does it go from here? 20. What did we the alt-right learn? What did we learn about it? Where does it go from here? 21. What new things did we learn about race relations? 22. What did we learn about immigration?

          3 replies 1 retweet 5 likes
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        22. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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          I’ll stop here for now. Enough can still go wrong between now and January (including a proof-of-simulator-interference level improbable Trump comeback) that I don’t want to get ahead of events even in indexing obvious questions. Next batch of questions after official results.

          1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes
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        23. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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          Things that can go wrong in order of increasing improbability 1. Trump finds non-frivolous legal challenge 2. Far-right triggers game-changing unrest 3. Assassinations of key figures 4. Natural-cause deaths 5. Statistical miracle gets Trump to 270* * proof that this is a sim

          2 replies 2 retweets 21 likes
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        24. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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          One question I *don’t* intend to worry about: how trump voters will react. They do them, we do us. Half this problem was caused by us trying to have both sides of this us-vs-them conversation. We’ve already excruciatingly analyzed and modeled them for 4 years. We’re good there.

          1 reply 3 retweets 24 likes
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        25. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 7
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          Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Venkatesh Rao

          23. What have we learned about Big Cheater games? (see next few tweets in quoted thread for context)https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1325099635350728714 …

          Venkatesh Rao added,

          Venkatesh Rao @vgr
          Strikes me there are two kinds of games: 1. games designed by idealists to make cheating hard 2. games designed by self-dealing elites to make cheating easy He’s used to type 2 and elections are type 1. It takes a lot long-term more work (eg gerrymandering) to cheat in type 1
          Show this thread
          1 reply 0 retweets 9 likes
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        26. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 7
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          24. The progressives helped Biden bring in enough democrats to win, but the national vote is a clear mandate against progressives. How will they negotiate their policy goals against that powerful background headwind?

          5 replies 2 retweets 16 likes
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        27. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 7
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          25. Early signs point to a Biden Derangement Syndrome (BDS) that’s much narrower but far deeper than Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). 1/3 the number of people under 3x higher psychosis threat. What has the experience with TDS taught us about how to mitigate BDS?

          3 replies 3 retweets 16 likes
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        28. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 7
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          26. Was polarization merely a pair of availability cascades around dead-end left/right extremist rhetoric? Will there be a moderation availability cascade if spotlight is on boring things, making depolarization a self-fulfilling prophecy?

          4 replies 1 retweet 7 likes
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        29. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 7
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          27. Did the outcome invalidate the deep-corruption promises of contrarian holy warrior revolutionary fervor on both ends or is this merely a halfway pause before a bernieward swing in 2024?

          4 replies 0 retweets 10 likes
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        30. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 7
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          28. Will the presidency as a cult of personality give way to a more lowkey role for the office, now that we’ve seen the perils of both too much positive and negative charisma? Can we be done with that charisma malarkey or will we fall for yet another angel-demon king in 2024?

          3 replies 4 retweets 26 likes
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        31. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 7
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          Venkatesh Rao Retweeted

          Amending question 25 a bit. Ryan is right, Biden does not arouse derangement level passions. BDS is really not symmetric with TDS. It’s really TLDS: Trump-loss derangement syndrome. It would exist no matter who he lost to. https://twitter.com/ryanfmason/status/1325170091177226240 …

          Venkatesh Rao added,

          This Tweet is unavailable.
          2 replies 0 retweets 10 likes
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