Venkatesh Rao on Waldenponding

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 4 November 2019

⏱️ 79 minutes

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Summary

Writer and management consultant Venkatesh Rao talks about Waldenponding with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Rao coined the term Waldenponding to describe various levels of retreating from technology akin to how Thoreau extolled the virtues of retreating from social contact and leading a quieter life at Walden Pond. Rao argues that the value of Waldenponding is overrated and that extreme Waldenponding is even somewhat immoral. Rao sees online intellectual life as a form of supercomputer, an intellectual ecosystem that produces new knowledge and intellectual discourse. He encourages all of us to contribute to that intellectual ecosystem even when it can mean losing credit for some of our ideas and potentially some of our uniqueness.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:08.0	I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:12.0	Our website is econtalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this podcast,
0:17.0	and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.0	We'll also find our archives where you can listen to every episode we've ever done going back to 2006.
0:27.0	Our email address is mailadycontalk.org. We'd love to hear from you.
0:33.0	Today is September 13, 2019.
0:35.0	My guest is writer and management consultant, Venkatesh Rao, founder and editor in chief of Ribbon Farm.
0:42.0	Our topic for today is a piece from his newsletter about the seductive nature of our devices and social media.
0:50.0	And it is called against Walden Ponding.
0:54.0	Thank you for being here, Russ. Thanks for having me on.
0:59.0	So what do you mean by Walden Ponding, which is a phrase I don't think it's going to catch on, but I loved it.
1:04.0	I don't know about that. I think it's already caught on at least in my circle.
1:09.0	Excellent. I did a little Twitter poll and one third of the people in my feed had heard of it from me.
1:18.0	But a bunch of people had heard it, not from me. So that's a good measure of inception in the eyes, I guess.
1:25.0	But yeah, it started like most things do with me these days.
1:31.0	I don't know, a gentle insult to troll some of my friends in tech who I think act a little too.
1:38.0	I don't know, Solomon's cell serious about the threat of digital devices hacking our brains.
1:45.0	So it started out as an insult. Then I did a little Twitter thread on it and realized I meant it more seriously than I was admitting to myself.
1:54.0	Then it turned into a newsletter. Then I did another sort of part two.
1:58.0	And since then I've been sort of exploring the concept all over the place and Twitter and other places.
2:03.0	So the basic idea is you've got this trend of people advocating so much more about it.
	...

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