The climate transition will be about 10x more brutal and happen about 3x faster than most people are thinking.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) July 24, 2018
We don’t talk enough about takeover-at-the-top disruption patterns. The business disruption model of encroaching from the margins and climbing upmarket to the core is just one attack vector. In politics/history, I suspect takeovers from the top are much more common.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) July 16, 2018
How to raise a zombie troll army in 12 steps.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) July 15, 2018
Step 1: Create something of real value, or if you can’t, leverage an inheritance into crap value with a large surface area. We’re NOT making stone soup here.
If you were to get a cruise ship in good condition at bargain rates, with financing, and set up a no-profit-no-loss sustainable seasteading community on it, what would it do for economic sustenance, where would it sail, who would live on it, how would it relate to land nations?
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) July 14, 2018
A lot of apparent stupidity is actually smart people being maliciously lazy. It’s like selective amnesia but for reasoning. You think fewer steps ahead when you suspect you might arrive at a personally inconvenient truth. Motivated non-reasoning. Plausible inferential deniability
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) July 9, 2018
It’s not actually possible to play for what Doug Rushkoff calls #TeamHuman. Turns out that’s yet another special interest group.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) July 3, 2018
How do people stay interested in money? I like both production and consumption but connecting the two with money feels increasingly exhausting, like paperwork or standards compliance. Makework middleware.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) June 30, 2018
The rationalist heuristic to figure out root causes for problems is to ask “why?” 5 times. Do not use when feeling stupid.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) June 29, 2018
The postrationalist heuristic to figure out root motivations for behaviors is to ask “why bother?” 5 times. Do not use when feeling depressed.
Meatspace is increasingly full of people doing insane shit driven by the invisible logic of conspiracy theories. At least with religious behaviors there’s markers of the specific fantasies being acted out and you know what to expect. https://t.co/uP2ryPVaRR
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) June 18, 2018
Fox+hedgehog=raccoon
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) June 13, 2018
I’ve been thinking about what makes something zombie-like, and have concluded it is lack of an innate identity maintenance/repair instinct. If your arm falls off and you don’t try to reattach it, you’re a zombie. Mutatis mutandis any complex system.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) June 11, 2018