Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
A thought on the impending Elonification of state capacity. “First-principles thinking” applied to physical systems can lead to clean rearchitecture of exhausted-paradigm systems based on the state-of-the-art knowledge that then creates a lot of new headroom for optimization “First-principles thinking” applied to human systems leads to purity-tested loyalist tribalism that reduces everyone into a few archetypal cartoons and chops off the long tail of human variety The only real first principle of human system is plurality and variety, but to first-principles fetishists this is deeply anxiety provoking, so they resist it and design around archetypal reductions instead. And convince themselves pluralism is either worthless or reducible to simpler affordances like “free speech.” It’s like fearing the periodic table and going back to “5 elements” “Government” unlike Twitter, is not a pure human system. Unlike SpaceX or Tesla, it’s also not a primarily physical systems challenge…
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
So Elonification will have varied effectiveness based on specific government function just as Elon has had mixed successes with his business ventures. But as with business there’s an incentive to double down hard on the failures as well as successes and claim it’s all successful. So best case: A couple of marquee successes (likely in military hardware spending, maybe roads and bridges) and a ton of enshittification painted as “success” elsewhere. And Elonification is not the only force at work. Those expecting Reagan 2.0 are going to be disappointed. We’ll see a lot of attempts to hand over lucrative bits of state capacity to oligarchic cronies. Not privatization in a classic sense but a corporatist clientelism. Expect to see a lot of obscure people get rich suddenly by being handed lucrative capital assets for pennies-on-the-dollar. With a lot of murky debt financing attached. Actual size of government will not shrink. Nor will debt. But there will be marquee divestments and shrinkage theater.
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