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 …

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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 …

29. Trump’s base was people whose life scripts dead-ended in the 1980s when their future went to China and robots. Is the woke base also a dead-end life script of intersectional dense-urban diversity as an end in itself? Has their future too gone elsewhere? Where? Service robots?