About Venkatesh Rao

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.

Peter Turchin’s concept of elite overproduction has been on my mind increasingly lately. It refers to historical conditions during which there are more people aspiring to elite roles in society than power structures can absorb. In 2021, to a first approximation, this is people with college degrees in fields with low market demand. A good measure of the degree of overproduction is the intensity and rancor around STEM vs. humanities type debates, and “do you want fries with that?” jokes about art history degrees. The idea of elite overproduction is descriptive, not normative. It does not matter who wins Twitter debates about the “true” cultural value of various elite roles and aspirations. What matters is the actual distribution of unemployed human elite overstocks. When large masses of people fail to find economic means to sustain the elite social roles they’ve been conditioned to expect, and trained and enculturated to occupy, you have elite overproduction going on. The prevailing default perception of the specifics of the distribution of surplus elites is correct in broad strokes, even if there are weird exceptions and corner cases. It is probably true right now that the average STEM degree is less likely to make you part of the elite overstock than a humanities degrees.

The jokes about do-you-want-fries-with-that are particularly fraught this year. Service industries struggle to hire workers, but are wary of letting wages inflate even as various other price levels succumb. Unlike commodity prices, which can go up and down with supply and demand, wages are something of a sociopolitical one-way door. They’re harder to push back down once they manage to creep up. There is revolutionary fervor in the air as well, around everything from student-loan forgiveness and stimulus economics to policing and urban blight. The optics around great wealth are much uglier today than 10 years ago, when they were last in the spotlight to this degree. Gen X has joined the Boomers on the villains side of the aisle. Younger generations struggle, while older generations sit on top of record savings.

One reason to take elite overproduction theory seriously as a lens right now is that Turchin has been unusually right lately in his calls about the timing of historical crisis points. He anticipated that 2020 would be a year of crisis, and it was. He didn’t predict Covid afaik, but the pandemic was merely a cherry on top of the dire basic scenario he foresaw.

Thirteen years ago, the Global Financial Crisis led to a generation of disaffected and underemployed young graduates turning their online-native skills to culture-warring. Ten years ago, that reached a flashpoint with the Occupy movement, and led to far right and far left movements making inroads into mainstream politics and shaping the next decade. That whole story was primarily an elite overproduction story. To the extent there was non-elite energy in the movements, it was there because it had been co-opted by wannabe-elite actors in service of their own frustrations. In the US, urban black political issues turned into white wannabe-elite causes, rural and small-town rust-belt blue collar issues turned into white wannabe-elite causes as well. For a few years, all political roads led to elite overstocks, often being transformed unrecognizably in the process. The result was the volatile mix of genuine and imagined grievances, insincere co-option of non-elite causes, and outright grift, that gave us the Great Weirding.

It’s commencement season and we can expect to see a new crop of commencement speeches soon. The global Class of 2021 will probably be much smaller than normal, and have to make do with curtailed or online ceremonies. Despite the small size of the cohort though, I suspect, most of this year’s crop of fresh graduates will still struggle to find jobs and careers, and be in a worse situation than the Class of 2008. I wonder what the commencement speakers will say. I’d have nothing much inspiring to say if challenged to give such a speech. It is hard for privileged older generations to say useful things to younger generations entering adulthood under much worse conditions.

Conditions today are far more fraught than in 2008. Freshly minted Zoomer wannabe-elites today are likely more disaffected than the Millennials who came of age through the GFC, more skilled at channeling that disaffection into elite overstock unrest, and have more history to learn from. On the plus side (such as it is) they have only every known fraught times, and have never known hope in the sense Millennials did. Will that make them more or less energized? I don’t know.

But in the meantime, on the demand side, elite roles have become even more scarce, non-elite under-the-API roles are under even greater stress, and there has been essentially no political or economic movement on the issues of 2011. The far right has, to some extent, shot its shot, but the far left has yet to do so. All-in-all it’s a much bigger powder keg than 2011.

Unless something exceptionally big and positive happens soon, as the emergency civic discipline of Covid loosens its grip on populations around the world, we can expect the 2020s to get even more explosively weird than the 2010s.

Here we go again. Fasten your seatbelts.

I am considering adopting two rules for projects that I think are very promising for 40+ lifestyles.

1. No new top-level projects (TLPs) (twitter thread)
2. Ten-year commitments to projects or no deal (twitter thread)

I don’t mean practically necessary projects like doing something to earn money. I mean non-necessary life projects like writing a blog, or a maker project.

Shitposting and idle dabbling are still allowed so long as they don’t grow into new TLPs. They can grow into subprojects of existing TLPs, but even then I need to make a ten-year commitment or not do them at all. There’s a bunch of ambiguity here, around what’s a project versus the contents of one (is a new blogchain a subproject or just a thread of content for the overall blogging project?), but set that aside for now.