(2020-02-18) Rao Weirding Diary11

Venkatesh Rao: Weirding Diary: 11. We’re barely seven weeks into 2020, and it’s already the weirdest year in my living memory.

As a 45-year-old with pretensions to more cultivated futurism tastes now, I think Toffler was kinda full of shit. There was no future shock in 1970-90. Just the normal tumult of ordinary history unfolding with some extra pageantry, like the moon landings.

He was the Thomas Friedman of his time I suppose. He died in 2016, just before what I’d call an actual shock wave hit. The one I’ve been calling the Great Weirding.

I do wonder though, if the weirding is merely in my head, as a middle-aging X’er, or whether there is something real going on that’s affecting everybody

People much younger than me, everywhere in the world, seem as shell-shocked and disoriented as older people.

I want to propose a definition of a shock, and frame the Great Weirding as a a particularly big one, via a distinction between map-making and sense-making

Map-makers try to make one map that accounts for everything they see happening to things they care about.

Sense-makers on the other hand, try to come at the territory using multiple maps, as well as direct experience. (sense-making)

As a sense-maker, you can say the world makes sense when the views afforded through different maps harmonize well, both with each other and with direct experience.

But when the world stops making sense, something else happens. Instead of Rashomon, you get Seinfeld.

Things stop making sense when it sounds like the different maps are about different territories altogether, and aren’t even talking about the same story

The Permaweird is more like the plot of a Seinfeld episode than Rashomon. For the young ‘uns, Seinfeld often featured 4 unrelated stories happening to the characters. These often came together in a weird joke at the end

Consider the coupling between anti-globalization, and the coronavirus, mediated by… pangolins. Wuhan is the home of an exotic cuisine featuring unusual kinds of wild game meat that play a role in rich people showing off. It is also an important logistics hub for China’s superpower ambitions

two mind-maps connected by a weak tie.

Consider the maps/narratives in play:

• Climate change
• Global ethnonationalist populist wave/anti-globalism
• Coronavirus
• Rise of China
• Inequality/resurgent populist socialism
• Economic boom
• Software eating the world and the techlash