About Venkatesh Rao

In 2018, historian Michael McCormick nominated 536 AD as the worst year to be alive. There was a bit of fun coverage of the claim. This sort of thing is what I think of as “little history.” It’s the opposite of Big History.

Big History is stuff like Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, or David Graeber’s Debt. I was a fan of that kind of sweeping, interpretive history when I was younger, but frankly, I really dislike it now. Historiographic constructs get really dubious and sketchy when stretched out across the scaffolding of millennia of raw events. Questions that are “too big to succeed” in a sense, like “why did Europe pull ahead of China,” tend to produce ideologies rather than histories. It’s good for spitballing and first-pass sense-making (and I’ve done my share of it on this blog) but not good as a foundation for any deeper thinking. Even if you want to stay close to the raw events, you get sucked into is-ought historicist conceits, and dangerously reified notions like “progress.” Yes, I’m also a big skeptic of notions like Progress Studies. To the extent that the arc of the moral universe has any coherent shape at all, to proceed on the assumption that it has an intelligible shape (whether desired or undesired), is to systematically blind yourself to the strong possibility that the geometry of history is, if not random, at least fundamentally amoral.

About the only Big History notion I have any affection for is Francis Fukuyama’s notion that in an important sense, Big History has ended (and I’m apparently the last holdout, given that Fukuyama himself has sort of walked back the idea).

Little histories though, are another matter. Truly little histories are little in both space and time, and much of history is intrinsically little in that sense, and fundamentally limited in the amount of inductive or abductive generalization it supports once you let go of overly ambitious historicist conceits and too-big-to-succeed notions like “Progress.” But some little histories are, to borrow a phrase from Laura Spinney’s book about the Spanish Flu, Pale Rider, “broad in space, shallow in time.” They allow you to enjoy most of the pleasures afforded by Big Histories, without the pitfalls.

Whether or not the specific year 536 was in fact the worst year, and whether or not the question of a “worst year” is well-posed, the year was definitely “broad in space, shallow in time” due to the eruption of an Icelandic volcano that created extreme weather world-wide. The list of phenomena capable of creating that kind of globalized entanglement of local histories is extremely short: pandemics, correlated extreme weather, and the creation or destruction of important technological couplings.

The subset of little histories that are “broad in space, shallow in time” — call them BISSIT years (or weeks, or days) — serve as synchronization points for the collective human experience. Most historical eras feature both “good” and “bad” from a million perspectives. Sampling perspectives from around the world at a random time, and adjusting for things like class and wealth, you would probably get a mixed bag of gloomy and cheery perspectives that are not all gloomy or cheery in the same way. But it is reasonable to suppose that at these synchronization points, systematic deviations from the pattern would emerge. Notions of good and bad align. Many of us would probably agree that 2020 sucked more than most years, and would even agree on the cause (the pandemic), and key features of the suckage (limitations on travel and socialization). Even if there were positive aspects to it, and much needed systemic changes ensue in future years, for those of us alive today, who are living through this little history, the actual experience of it kinda sucks.

The general question of whether the human condition is progressing or declining to me is both ill-posed and uninteresting. You get into tedious and sophomoric debates about material prosperity versus perceived relative deprivation. You have people aiming gotchas at each other (“aha, the Great Depression was actually more materially prosperous than optimistic Gilded Age 1890s!” or “there was a lot of progress during the Dark Ages!”).

The specific question of whether a single BISSIT year should be tagged with positive or negative valence though, is much more interesting, since the normal variety of “good” and “bad” perspectives temporarily narrows sharply. Certainly, BISSIT years have a sharply defined character given by their systematic deviations, and sharp boundaries in time. They are “things” in the sense of being ontologically well-posed historiographic primitives that are larger than raw events, but aren’t reified and suspect constructs like “Progress” or “Enlightenment.” There is a certain humility to asking whether these specific temporal things are good or bad, as opposed to the entire arc of history. Two such things need not be good or bad in the same way. History viewed as a string of such BISSIT beads need not have a single character. Perhaps there are red, green, and blue beads punctuating substrings of grey beads, and in your view, red and green beads are good, while blue beads are bad, and so on. We don’t have to have a futile debate about Big History that’s really about ideological tastes. But we can argue about whether specific beads are red or blue. You can ask about the colors of historical things. We can take note of the relative frequencies of colored versus grey beads. And if you’re inclined to think about Big History at all, you can approach it as the narrative of a string of beads that need not have an overall morally significant character. Perhaps, like space, time can be locally “flat” (good or bad as experienced by the people within BISSIT epochs) but have no moral valence globally. Perhaps we live in curved historical event-time, with no consistent “up” everywhere.

A week ago, for the first time in decades, I spent several days in a row doing many hours of hands-on engineering work in a CAD tool (for my rover project), and noticed that I had particularly vivid dreams on those nights. My sleep data from my Whoop strap confirmed that I’d had higher REM sleep on those nights.

These were dreams that lacked narrative and emotional texture, but involved a lot of logistics. For example, one dream I took note of involved coordinating a trip with multiple people, with flights randomly canceled. When I shared this on Twitter, several people replied to say that they too had similar dreams after days of intense but relatively routine information work. A couple of people mentioned dreaming of Tetris after playing a lot, something I too have experienced. High-REM dreaming sleep seems to be involved in integrating cognitive skill memories. This paper by Erik Hoel, The Overfitted Brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization, pointed out by @nosilver, argues that dreaming is about mitigating overfitting of learning experiences, a problem also encountered in deep learning. This tracks for me. It sounds reasonable that my “logistics” dreams were attempts to generalize some CAD skills to other problems with similar reasoning needs. REM sleep is like the model training phase of deep learning.

This got me interested in the idea of tapping into the unconscious towards pragmatic ends. For example, using the type of dreams you have to do feedback regulation of the work you do during the day. I made up a half-assed hypothesis: the type of dream you have at night depends on 2 variables relating to the corresponding daytime activity — the level of conflict in the activity (low/high) and whether or not the learning loop length is longer or shorter than 24 hours. If it is shorter, you can complete multiple loops in a day and the night-time dream will need to generalize from multiple examples. If it’s less than a complete loop, there is no immediate resolution, so instead you get more dreams that integrate experiences in an open-loop way, using narrative-based explanations. If there’s no conflict and no closed loops, you get low dreaming. There’s nothing to integrate, and you didn’t do much thinking that day (which for me tends to translate to poor sleep). I made up the 2×2 above for this idea.

I have no idea whether this particular 2×2 makes any sense, but it is interesting that such phenomenology lends itself to apprehension in such frameworks at all. I rarely remember dreams, but I think even I could maintain a dream journal based on this scheme, and try to modulate my days based on my nights.

This also helps explain why people in similar situations might have similar dreams (such as all the “corona dreams” that many of us were having during early lockdown months). It also lends substance to the narrative conceits of stories like H. P. Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulhu, which begins with people having widespread similar dreams (where it turns into science fiction is in the specificity of the shared motifs and symbols that appear).

You don’t need to buy into dubious Jungian or Freudian theories of individual and collective dreaming to think about this stuff in robust ways. The development of deep learning, in particular, offers us a much more robust handle on this phenomenology. Dreams are perhaps our journeys into our private latent spaces, undertaken for entirely practical purposes like cleaning up our messy daytime learning (there’s other theories of dreaming too of course, like David Eagleman’s theory that we dream to prevent the visual centers from getting colonized by other parts of the brain at night, but we’re only hypothesizing contributing causes, not determinative theories).

I’ve developed two obsessions through the pandemic that I think will persist long past the end of it, probably to the end of my life: tinkering and story-telling.

On the tinkering front, I’ve built out a nice little science-and-engineering workshop over the last year and acquired more skills in less time than I expected to, since I don’t have a high opinion of my own hands-on abilities. As I’ve mentioned before, this is still hard to write about because while the doing is fun, getting to interesting things to show off and talk about will take some time. It’s good enough fodder for tweeting though, and I’ve been maintaining several fun ongoing threads about electronics experiments, my rover project, and 3d printing. At some point, I hope I’ll be able to write essays about this stuff, but right now it’s only coming together at Twitter level. Overall, tinkering has been the easier journey, I guess because I’m an engineer by training, so I am not really starting from scratch. Though all my old knowledge feels rusty, I think I did hit the ground running when I started around August last year.

Storytelling has been the tougher journey. In many ways, it’s very like tinkering, except with machines that run inside human brains. It is very unlike nonfiction writing. I’ve made more progress on exploring storytelling theory than in actually telling stories. But one of my breakthroughs was realizing that storytelling as a skill is orthogonal to writing skill, and the latter even gets in the way. One way to short-circuit the writer brain is to use cartoons, and I’ve done 2 comic-format stories so far this year: Space Luck and Comet Bob. I’ve also managed one prose story, Non-Contact, though it’s more a world-building design study of an idea than a fully developed story, kinda like the design study prototype I built for my rover early on. I am not yet sure what my storytelling medium is — words or pictures.

Together, these two obsessions are driving what I think is the biggest pivot not just in the life of this blog, but in my own adult life. It’s a lifestyle shift, and I’m still coming to grips with the cascading effects on other aspects of my life. Storytelling tinkerers, I am discovering, must necessarily live a different kind of life than essayist-consultant-observers. So I’ve unwittingly set up a certain narrative tension in my life that’s going to resolve itself one way or another. It’s a different headspace, as lived from the inside, and presents a different picture when viewed from the outside. Switching between nonfiction and fiction modes, or between management consulting and maker-tinkerer modes, is very disorienting, but not in an unpleasant way.

One interesting thing about both is that they are behaviors that can get you put in more of a box than the sorts of thing I’m better known for. Storytelling and tinkering are both play-like behaviors that have a lot more disruptive potential than most “serious” behaviors, but they look harmless and are easy to put in a box and ignore. They are the quintessential mostly-harmless human activities. The median tinkering project or story is entirely inconsequential. Net likelihood of impact, zero. You either enjoy the safe, marginalized obscurity of the boxes you get put in, or you’re playing for the one-in-a-million shot at making history. I’m not sure what I’m aiming at with either activity. Probably both outcomes in proportion to their actual probabilities.

At any rate, it’s nice to have some obsessions going. It makes me feel strangely young again. Obsessiveness is naturally a young person’s mode of being. To discover it again in middle age, in a somewhat mellowed form, is something of an unexpected gift, even if the precipitating event of a pandemic makes it something of a gift from the devil.