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Venkatesh Rao ☀️

@vgr

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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Try saying this in a military voice with gunfire and helicopters in the background
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Done pretending to be an architect. Gonna start pretending to be an urban planner now.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Fascinating Rorschach test. Assuming they’re the same dollar value, would you rather have: a) A box of random crap selected from Shenzen markets by a designer with a sense of fun b) A fine, artisan mechanical keyboard by the same designer? Context: https://shop.keyboard.io/products/a-box-of-crap-from-shenzhen https://shop.keyboard.io/blogs/news/box-of-crap-november-2023-dubious-treasures-from-the-markets-of-shenzhen I don’t want either but if forced to choose I’m 100% picking a)
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Weird how just showing up regularly and doing your thing can influence people in powerfully snowballing ways. It matters less to people what you do than that you do it reliably. If I were starting blogging today and could magically choose between one guaranteed viral hit article and 100 kinda decent articles that I could drip out weekly over a year I’d pick the latter every single time. The thought experiment is not quite right since you’re conditioning your own behaviors too, not just the reader’s but you get the point. Your behavior should be part of somebody else’s habits.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
We’ve had conversations in the program about what to call what we’ve been trying to incept. Candidates so far have included: Protocol Studies: Humanitues vibes like Area Studies or Cultural Studies Protocol Science: Kinda like computer science Protocol Entrepreneurship: A praxis type label that breaks dichotomies like public/private and proprietary/open source I’m suddenly leaning towards protocolics as in robotics. Has an all-of-the above feel.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
I haven’t read any Byung-Chul Han in the original, but I like the glosses I’ve read. His critiques of “achievement society” etc sound right and help explain a lot of trends I’ve also been paying attention to including quiet quitting, laying flat etc. But one weak area in his thought seems to be what to do about any of it. I think I gave an idea. Everything he critiques can be reduced to pursuit of efficiency over thoroughness. I think the obvious counter-programming is to pursue thoroughness over efficiency. Thoroughness is in some ways the true north of protocols. When you forget that, protocols degenerate to bureaucracy and then to misguided bureaucratic efficiency drives. I think what reactivates quiet-quitting type people is thoroughness. Their exhaustion is a rational reaction to efficiency demands. Thoroughness focus is restorative.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
An aspiring artist is someone who expects to get paid by normies for taking themselves seriously A serious artist is someone who expects to get paid by normies because other artists take them seriously An established artist is someone who actually gets paid by other artists because normies take them seriously A successful artist is someone who gets paid by normies by making room for them to take themselves seriously A pioneering artist is someone who can’t tell normies and artists apart
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
The work of commerce is to try and reduce family life to a hobby The work of family life is to try and reduce commerce to a hobby
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Every Unix shell command became a billion dollar web2 company. Perhaps every web2 company can become a farcaster channel or bundle? Unbundle platforms into channel streams 🧐 Farcaster as the new Comcast 🫡
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Can keep hobbies and work apart = working person Only hobbies and not work treated as hobbies = retirement Work treated as hobby = moral hazard assholery Hobby treated as work = self-importance (many substack writers fall into this category— they have no real ability to hurt anyone more than themselves)
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
I always thought www before domain names went out of fashion because it was redundant with the http before the :// But for other protocols, subdomains did make sense because sometimes you serve them over http instead of via their own clients This still feels a little confused to me. Is there a use case for subdomains as protocol names? Like mail. domain name is the mail server, but mailto:// is the thing that triggers an email client. So http is more like a universal OTP protocol, with www as the default
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
A leader is best when people barely know he exists. When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves. And when it screws up badly, they will blame themselves. -- Lao Tzu
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Who's up to make cryptorobotics happen?
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
The difference between work and a hobby is whether or not you could end up hurting other people more badly than yourself. It's not about whether or not you are getting paid. Flying your personal plane for pleasure is a hobby, especially if you don't care if you die trying a stunt. Taking along a passenger is work. Even if they appear to sign up for the risks on paper. What counts is having enough knowledge to judge the risk AND enough agency to control your outcomes. I still think about the Titan submersible incident. Work going bad because it was treated like a hobby. The fate of the 19-year-old Suleman Dawood is especially tragic. The others at least arguably knew what they were doing and what sort of person they were trusting their life to in Stockton Rush. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_submersible_implosion#Fatalities
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
If you age gracefully without any midlife crises, it’s called a mellowdrama
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
There are 3 kinds of systems: Monolithic systems, composable systems, and contraptions
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
According to my google alerts feed, the main classes of protocols by frequency of alerts are: 1. Crypto 2. NFL concussions 3. British royals 4. Medical research 5. Everything else https://forum.summerofprotocols.com/t/history-of-the-nfl-s-concussion-protocol/1608
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Truly remarkable how despite steady growth Farcaster always gets left out of commentary like this. There is a genuine parallel universe invisibility effect beyond the cryptowall. I don’t think this is a problem to be solved. Rather, it’s a regime boundary to be respected and understood. Just as you think of your insurance spending and regular consumption spending in separate buckets, your social media attention budget has separate buckets. Your financial budget has buckets: Tax, retirement savings (including equity part of mortgage), insurance, emergency liquidity, and consumption. Your attention budget has analogous buckets. Tax = news. Retirement savings = learning. Insurance = Censorship resistant media use. Emergency liquidity = email/slack/zoom other work channels. Consumption = regular infotainment media, including social.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Interesting angle on @cdixon.eth RWO argument. “We are thus left with the unsettling reality of an industry that became "evil" before it became useful. It should be no surprise then that much of the public has soured on it.” Novel path dependency argument I haven’t seen before. He concludes the crypto revolution is getting corrupted and committing “revolutionary suicide.” I mostly agree with the diagnosis but suspect the treatment he proposes is wishful thinking (regulation+self-policing driving valuations down hard enough to kill the “casino” part of the economy to save the “computer” part). Instead the key is to rethink the political-philosophical first principles around a non-apocalyptic vision first how censorship resistance infrastructure can become a check and balance on industrial-era political structures. And the battle actually starts with E2EE not crypto. https://paragraph.xyz/@unmediatedthoughts/casino-killed-the-computer-star?referrer=0x1da73c35c521946bce66968be540406eda89f995
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Excellent 2x2 here. Silly/serious people vs posts. I think farcaster is not plottable on it though, since people here have opted in more to the medium than a particular content regime. “As one astute Bluesky user, Pavel Samsonov, wrote: “bluesky (serious people making silly little posts) is the spiritual opposite of linkedin (deeply silly people trying to write serious thoughtposts).” Samsonov even included a handy visual aid.” https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/27/blueskys-best-shot-at-success-is-to-embrace-shitposting/?guccounter=1
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