Many Other Shoes Are Dropping

Metadata

• Author: Venkatesh Rao
• Full Title: Many Other Shoes Are Dropping
• Category: #articles
• Summary: The author reflects on the state of the world and how it influences his writing projects. He discusses using narrative scaffoldings to make sense of the world in real time. The year 2024 is anticipated to be a significant period with many narratives converging.
• URL: https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/many-other-shoes-are-dropping

Highlights

• I think I have five main narrative scaffoldings going here in various stages of derailment:
  1. —8 to +4 years: The Great Weirding series
  2. -50 to +25 years: Mediocre Computing series
  3. -200 to +200 years: The Clockless Clock book project
  4. -400 to +400 years: After Westphalia longue duree history project
  5. Metatemporal stuff: Protocol narratives series (View Highlight)
• • 8 to +4 years: The Great Weirding series • -50 to +25 years: Mediocre Computing series • -200 to +200 years: The Clockless Clock book project • -400 to +400 years: After Westphalia longue duree history project • Metatemporal stuff: Protocol narratives series (View Highlight)
• sense. I think I’m something that could not have exited before the internet. I write connected skeins of essays that are somewhat, but not entirely, serializable, and do poorly when ripped from a hyperlinked context. It’s not great for archival, accessibility, or legibility at scale, but I think it is well-suited to making sense of the world in real time while also enjoying the luxury of a bit of poiesis through writing. It is living, breathing text of a sort only the internet allows you to generate. (View Highlight)
• Which means the world, for most of us, alive at most times, looks something like this. Some narratives are starting or ending around where you are. Others are shaping things but aren’t going to make your life either easy or exciting. Just annoying. Metatemporal theorizing existing as a fragmented overlay, lending significance to some events, and leaving other events meaningless, with a good deal of useless empty conceptualizing. (View Highlight)
• As above, so below. I’ll turn 50 later this year, and that feels like the end of the “growth arc” of my life. As a kid, people had various theories about my potential. At 50, I’m sort of a finished product, regardless of what the growth mindset crowd says. But at the same time, there’s a sense of a clean sheet for post-50. (View Highlight)
• Is writing to sense-make a useful thing to be doing? (for me, not you; utility to you is a side effect). If not useful, is it at least interesting or exciting? If neither, is there some other mode of writing that’s a richer way of being in the world today? If not, is there something other than writing I could/should be doing? (View Highlight)
• Writing seemed like a more culturally significant, personally satisfying, aesthetically appropriate, and existentially penetrating thing to be doing in 2014 than it does now in 2024. (View Highlight)