(2024-08-10) Rao The New Systems Of Survival

Venkatesh Rao: The New Systems of Survival. About a decade ago, I was briefly obsessed with Jane Jacobs’ Systems of Survival model from her 1992 book of that name.

As is usually the case with me, I never actually read the book,1 but just went off down my own bunny trail based on a Wikipedia-level gloss

In 2014, I thought the model was great!

In 2014, most people were clearly either Saint (Guardian) types or Trader types

I don’t think the model works anymore. There are many people I used to consider clear Trader types in 2014 who now act more Guardian-like than the Pope

And the break in the model is not subtle. It’s not merely fraying on the edges. It feels like it’s not even wrong anymore. A deep fault line has emerged that has completely undermined it.

Given that the Jacobs was a product of 60s/70s conflicts between Johnsonian Great Society and Reaganesque schools of governance, and published her book in 1992 (probably Peak Neoliberalism, given that Bill Clinton rose to power by simply adopting the Reagan playbook), I suspect her model is, unconsciously, a very particular one, reflecting the peculiar historical era it was developed in.

Which brings me to the idea I’ve been noodling on for the last few months: A new pair of systems of survival has emerged that are defined by opposed relationships to the problem of the growing ungovernability of the increasingly complicated world, and the collapse of previous theaters of pretending to govern or be governed (see my newsletters from the last two weeks, The Art of Pretending to Govern and Bullshitization and Common Indifference Problems).

The LinkedIn-Twitter Test

Given any system, person, behavior, or idea, does it strike you as a LinkedIn type thing, or a Twitter type thing?

I ran a poll a few weeks ago, asking people which of the two platforms they’d want to eliminate from existence (not just quit personally). And as I fully expected, but most people apparently didn’t, the results were about even, with, as I expected, a slight edge for people wanting to erase LinkedIn from existence.

As my screenshot above shows, I personally voted to get rid of Twitter. But I do understand why others might have chosen LinkedIn, and why some people can’t comprehend choices that differ from theirs.

The reasoning was also fairly consistent. People who voted to keep LinkedIn saw the real deep value in professional networks for career development, recruiting and so on, and saw Twitter as mostly a toxic cesspool of ignorable noise. People who voted to keep Twitter saw real deep value in the “alpha” — real actionable intelligence signals bubbling out of the noise — and saw LinkedIn as a toxic theater of bullshit pretensions and credentialed puffery by useless and clueless people.

think of it as testing for resonance/harmony vs. dissonance, when you juxtapose the thing with our two test entities.

Substack is clearly more LinkedIn than Twitter, while WordPress blogs are more Twitter than LinkedIn. Instagram is more LinkedIn, TikTok is more Twitter.

BUT… at an individual level, far right and far left are both Twitter (including the far lefties who would want to erase Twitter), while centrists both right and left are LinkedIn.

Among the Twitter alternatives, the Fediverse and Threads are more LinkedIn, while Bluesky and Farcaster are more Twitter.

Antivaxxers are Twitter, vaccine people are LinkedIn.

Curiously, which one you vote to eliminate does not indicate what kind of person you are.

Equally curiously, how you succeed or fail is not an indicator either

What does the LinkedIn-Twitter test measure?

I think the test measures how you instinctively react to the challenge of surviving in an increasingly and visibly ungoverned world settling into a Permaweird state

The two possible responses are:
Lean into the weirdness, as in when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro (Hunter S Thompson)
Lean into what Adam Curtis called hypernormalcy in his documentary HyperNormalization.

Curtis documentary — spazzy and wild-eyed, but entertaining and insightful in parts) uses the term to refer to an increasingly bizarre, surreal, and distorted kind of institutional normalcy that has become increasingly unmoored from anything real, which people nevertheless double down on and cling to harder and harder

The surprising thing isn’t that they do it. It’s natural to cling to what used to work for reassurance. The surprising thing is that it works as a system of survival.

These are the “new systems of survival” in my headline. You can self-classify by looking at whether you feel more at home on Twitter or LinkedIn, even if you don’t like the experience of feeling at home there. A traumatizing home is still a home.

Let’s call the associated archetypes professional weirdos (or just weirdos for short), and hypernormies, or just normies for short.

Weirdos living by a Weirdness syndrome code of values, and normies living by a Hypernormalcy syndrome code of values. Creative naming, I know.

In what ways are the two syndromes adaptive vs. maladaptive?

The Weirdness Syndrome is obviously more adaptive in one way — being attuned to the growing signals of weirdness on the margins of normalcy, and reacting faster to it.

But unfortunately for weirdos, simply attending to weirdness more closely does not make your mental models of what is going on any better, or your faster reactions actually superior. You might notice weirdness first, but adopt a maladaptive crackpot response

The Hypernormalcy Syndrome is obviously more adaptive in one way — rationally holding on to the very high residual value in the unraveling institutional landscape, and being able to navigate and access opportunity spaces within it, using well-established economic extraction patterns like “careers” and “jobs.”

Each side overestimates the power and threat of the other.

Can we say that either of the new syndromes is a clear descendant of one of the older ones? It’s hard.

while there are no clear lines of descent from old systems of survival to new, clearly, the new systems are refactoring the old ones in powerful ways.

there are distinct world-processes underway today (by world-process I mean things like industrialization, globalization, urbanization…), that correspond to the simultaneous growth of both weirdness and hypernormalcy.

I call these processes LinkedInification and Twitterification

A thing gets LinkedInified when it starts to get governed by systematic “career hacking” type behaviors that can be taught, learned, and practiced with a certain dispassionate indifference to human costs

hypernormalization, but without the suggestion of conspiratorial orchestration

hewing to the optics of any legible script or pattern, and working by reliable playbooks of any sort. (near-cargo cult?)

A thing gets Twitterified when it starts to get governed by raw, instant, id-driven responses to unfiltered reality signals, with streaks of real emotion and authenticity breaking through in what is meant to be pure calculated performance, whether or not that authenticity is actually pleasant to behold

Here is the real tell: LinkedInification moves societal dynamics towards what Taleb called Mediocristan, while Twitterification moves societal dynamics towards what he called Extremistan.

Ironically, Twitter itself is getting weirdly LinkedInified, and LinkedIn is getting hypernormally Twitterified.

Taleb’s Mediocristan and Extremistan will exist as interwoven textures. You will find it harder and harder to stay in just one of the regimes.

If you’re convinced one side of the weird/hypernormal divide is obviously correct, and can’t see why the other side manages to exist at all, let alone attracting half the population, you might have developed a certain blindness to a prevailing condition I call epistemic stalemate

manifests as neither side being a good default place to source your answers to the questions and survival challenges life throws at you. Even on a single question or concern, you might have to assemble your picture of reality from pieces sourced from both sides.

Boeing is mostly a clear-cut case of Hypernormies Gone Wild.

There are two resolutions to the “Boeing problem” on the table:

The Weird answer: Let Elon Musk start an airliner company

The Hypernormal answer: Let traditional aerospace engineers from Boeing, Lockheed, maybe even Airbus, take a stab at fixing Boeing from the inside

Neither answer is obviously right or wrong

And maybe the number of airliner crashes have to go up before they can go down, a la SpaceX’s exploding rockets early on.

But aerospace isn’t a sector you can revolutionize overnight by releasing an app.

There is also merit to the idea that the answer lies within the bizarro-surreal theater of hypernormalcy.

Boeing as an organization, despite its problems, is likely the repository of vast amounts of relevant knowledge and expertise.

This is what I mean by epistemic stalemate. Both sides have enough merit to their claims to the truth to be not just credible, but necessary to solving most problems.

To understand the challenges of the stalemate, you only have to look at Tesla — an icon of Weird industry, led by possibly the leading Titan of Weirdness. But it is telling that the main Tesla factory in Fremont was originally a GM-Toyota plant. Large portions of its workforce are auto industry veterans

*This stalemate is deeply frustrating to both sides, because neither likes relying on the other side for essential functions.

So they descend to name-calling.*

For a decade or longer, the phrase “mainstream media” has been used as a slur for its role in defining the boundaries of normalcy. Words like “expert,” “elite,” and of course, “normie” have also turned into slurs. All these slurs point to the hypernormal world. To LinkedIn.

In the last few weeks, the hypernormal world has finally adopted what in hindsight is the natural counter-move — weird deployed as a slur by Democrats in the US against the Trump campaign. But it’s revealing that it is a center-to-margins insult, a dual of normie, rather than a left to right insult. In fact, it would probably work just as well aimed at the far left.

Since I’ve spent a decade shilling my Great Weirding neologism and theory

weird as a slur just feels… weird to me.

But weird as a slur has apparently been… weirdly effective?

This surprises me. I’ve personally always used the term in value-neutral ways as a description of the zeitgeist, and in a mildly positive way as a character descriptor.

But while I don’t admire either Donald Trump or Vance, and it wouldn’t have occurred to me to describe either as weird, clearly it is appropriate in some way. As in, they’re the opposite of the hypernormal type of party-machine candidates for office from either party

The sort of weirdness I admire is, I suppose, a subset of all possible varieties of weirdness.

The thing is, yes the people being called weird are weird, but that’s not what’s objectionable or distasteful about them as political candidates or human beings. I dislike Trump and Vance not because either is weird, but because they hold ugly attitudes also held by many non-weird people, and exhibit ugly behaviors I won’t condone that are also exhibited by many normies.

The weird/hypernormal axis for me is orthogonal to the moral axis.

If reports of the effectiveness are correct

I think it speaks to both the unexpected strength of the hypernormalcy field globally, as well as the insecurities relative to the hypernormal establishment felt by those labeled weird.

enough people are invested deeply enough in hypernormalcy that they feel strengthened by rejecting weirdness and identifying with the insulting side. And enough people leaning into weirdness on the receiving side have a residual yearning for the trappings of (hyper)normalcy to feel the sting of the insult.

I think I missed the sting in weird as an insult in part because to the extent I have comparable anxieties, they point the other way. I’m boringly pedigreed globalist hypernormlacy personified

It’s the street cred of weirdness that I lack, and occasionally feel a twinge of anxiety about.

So here we all are now, in 2024, caught between

I don’t think it is possible to survive entirely using just one of the two new systems of survival. You have to integrate them. You need synthesis.

I like Wojak, the ubiquitous many-avatared meme character, as a symbol of the right synthesis of weirdness and hypernormalcy.

Wojak is not just at the bottomwit and topwit margins, he’s the midwit too. He can be be both calm and fretful.

In Wojak, the two new systems of survival meet and harmonize. He is both weird and hypernormal

In the new system, we don’t yet have the mature yin-yang state. The Way of Wojak remains aspirational.