Venkatesh Rao

While politics adversely selects for *some* insincere shamelessness, putting an individual who literally lacks an entire emotional range in a key position that assumes it, is to break the system. Like putting a color-blind person in a job with an RGB decision-coding system.

A broader zeitgeist that happened in the last few years is that “scene-making shameless person lacking a certain emotional chunk of emotional range” got recoded as “genius contrarian” the way “wears black turtleneck” got recoded as “Steve Jobs level visionary.”

Some dressed it up further with being on autism spectrum becoming an aspirational contrarian-genius claim. Basic logical error. Many geniuses being on the spectrum does not mean all on the spectrum are geniuses. Sadly, most just have compromised judgment with no upside.

Anyhow, back to shame, insincerity, and hypocrisy becoming part of the OS again, and shamelessness, scene-making and cheater-detection going back to being occasionally useful and tolerable tactics, rather than treated as a lofty contrarian-genius-asshole philosophy of governance.

In case you’re wondering why I’m focusing on cheater-detection as a pathology...https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1343975213424250881 …

Forgot perhaps the biggest piece of the shame/regret/forgiveness layer of the OS, which Biden is reinstalling: a proper place in public life for death and mourning, which occasion perhaps the most sincere displays of shame/regret/guilt/etc. Biden’s brought that back in a big way.

Some people suspected the constant presence of the late Beau Biden in the narrative was more than a little staged. But there has been a core of sincere emotion there. The sense of this inauguration also being the first public mourning for 400k dead from Covid also feels real.

Stuff like this Arlington ceremony... they just didn’t seem meaningful when Trump did them. He seemed puzzled like a blind person at a silent movie. At some level he didn’t seem to get why people were doing somber ceremonies. I suspect he thought funerals are just extreme PC.

There’s a sense of narrative claustrophobia being lifted. There’s a lot more room in the grand narrative for a spectrum of narratives that don’t need to all cohere. This pluralism is ironically what the trumpist narrative monoculture demonized as a monolith. Pure projection.

It’s not that their story wasn’t being heard. They seemed to think it was the only one that had a right to be heard. When you’re used to a narrative monopoly, pluralism feels like censorship.

Jeez he’s walking the last block jogging over to barriers to shake hands. The instinct for humanizing optics on display here is the polar opposite of trump’s instinct for imperial grandiosity. I can’t recall how Trump did it, but I would guess limo to the footsteps.

Which is ironic, since Biden represents continuation of an imperial mode of US government but looks like Amtrak Joe, while Trump ran the show like a petty small town council but acted like an emperor

Kamala Harris family is very Modern Family. They just need to add a gay couple in there to look like a nightmare to Hallmark channel.

General thought: trad administrations are highly scaled systems with a necessary and meaningful distinction between backend and frontend. There is a minimum necessary theatricality to the front-end. It’s a UX metaphor. This reads as “fakeness” to libertarian-scale imaginations.