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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 30
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      The previous ideological conflicts felt like wrestlers circling in a ring looking to grapple. This one feels like a live-and-let-live mutual retreat. You don't have to agree on most things. You share an economy, you share science and technology, you go your own way elsewhere.

      3 replies 0 retweets 9 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 30
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      I started with a future-like-the-past analogy between the US and UK rise-and-fall, but the future is mostly not like the past now. The biggest difference is that we now live in a rapidly greying world. A retired world of aging populations.

      1 reply 0 retweets 9 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 30
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      A good mental model of world of the next 40 years is: 1. Global divergence of civilizations 2. Energy transition (whether or not you believe in climate change) 3. Aging population 4. Technological progress decoupling from nation-states, and turning into a political commodity

      2 replies 8 retweets 44 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 30
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      4. is huge and we're only now beginning to appreciate how huge. 1851 to 1939 was the heyday of World's Fairs, when technological prowess was synonymous with national identity. The World's Fairs went into decline after that and become a joke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_fair#Industrialization_(1851%E2%80%931938) …

      2 replies 1 retweet 14 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 30
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      After 1939 the World's Fair stopped being some sort of national tech olympics and became a kind of boring bureaucrat show (something similar is going to happen to the sports olympics soon...). Tech became a political commodity after 1939, not a way to build national identity.

      2 replies 2 retweets 29 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 30
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      I think the starting point was the race to grab Nazi rocket scientists at the close of WW2. Once that chapter closed, it became clear that science and tech had gotten complex and valuable enough that they could not respect national boundaries.

      1 reply 0 retweets 16 likes
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 30
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      Complex advances would be the result of developments in a dozen countries, orchestrated by MNCs, and distributed to global markets, with only a little bit of border friction. Open source takes that logic to an extreme. Countries don't compete on tech anymore, corporations do.

      3 replies 3 retweets 17 likes
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    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 30
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      This creates an interesting political puzzle. To the extent nations continue to persist as the primary political units (at least another century imo), what will they be competing on if not technology?

      3 replies 0 retweets 15 likes
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    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 30
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      Modern nation-states date to 1648 (westphalia being the conventional starting point), so for 200 years or so, nations *didn't* compete on tech. They competed on mercantile economics and early-modern warfare. So one scenario is going back to that, which is what Trump wanted.

      3 replies 0 retweets 13 likes
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    10. Neal Coleman‏ @necoleman Nov 30
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      To what extent were early Westphalian mercantilist nation-states their own corporations, competing over raw materials and attempting to organize vertically-integrated supply chains?

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 30
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      Replying to @necoleman

      Not much. Global trade was a fraction of what it is today. Most economics was domestic economics, and global trade was mostly in luxury goods until industrialization kicked in. The biggest competition was over land and people (slaves).

      11:24 AM - 30 Nov 2020
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