Venkatesh Rao's 'World Machines'

As usual, I found Venkatesh Rao's writinting in his latest piece "The Divergence Machine" a bit opaque and wordy, so I asked ChatGPT 5.2 to help me out with a condensation and summary, which I archive and pass on to readers here:

Here’s a condensed and clear summary of The Divergence Machine by Venkatesh Rao (Contraptions, Jan 5 2026):

Core Thesis
Rao introduces the concept of the divergence machine as a successor world-machine to the modernity machine explored in his 2025 book club series. The divergence machine’s logic has been built from ~1600–2000 and has fully operated only for about 25 years. It doesn’t reverse modernity but supersedes its organizing principles. Contraptions

World Machines Framework

• World machines are conceptual contraptions that embody how the world orders itself in particular epochs.

• In any period, one machine operates, one is being built, and another may be declining or dying.

• The modernity machine (constructed 1200–1600, dominant 1600–2000) focused on legibility and convergence—making people, systems, and ideas enumerable, interoperable, and canonical.

• The divergence machine rests on a different logic: variety, expansion of differences, and decentralized relationality rather than centralized canonicity. Contraptions

How the Divergence Machine Works

• It does not aim to dismantle modernity directly nor is it just “postmodernity.”

• It takes for granted many effects of the modernity machine (e.g., global connectivity) but operates in spaces where modernity’s centralized canon no longer determines outcomes.

• Its defining move is to make canonicity irrelevant, focusing instead on pervasive diversity and plural modes of being that coexist without unified narratives. Contraptions

Phenomenology and Method
Rao suggests readers filter phenomena through several lenses to see if they belong to the divergence machine rather than to other world processes like:

• Late modernity (zombie persistence of modern norms),

• Postmodernity (reaction/critique of modernity),

• Metamodernity (piecemeal modern revival). Contraptions

Guiding Questions for Divergence
Rao proposes probing events/processes for traits such as:

• Plurality over convergence,

• Relativized canon,

• Generative variety,

• Coexistence without closure,

• Emergent “liveness” not reducible to modern or postmodern categories. Contraptions

Practical Context
This piece sets up the 2026 Contraptions Book Club theme, with readings (e.g., Candide, The Underground Empire, philosophical tensions among Enlightenment figures) intended to explore the formative periods and idea-spaces relevant to the divergence machine’s logic. Contraptions

Big Picture Takeaway
Rao’s divergence machine is a conceptual model for understanding the contemporary world not as a breakdown of modernity but as a phase transition where plurality and decentralized, non-canonical relationality become the driving logic of civilization, distinct from both modern and postmodern frameworks. Contraptions

The Institutional Stance - an evolved intuitive theory?

I have just been sent an article by BBS (Brain and Behavioral Sciences) that is soliciting commentaries on an article by Jara-Ettinger and Dunham titled "The Institutional Stance" that suggests that we have an inherited ability not only to represent other minds, but also to represent social institutional structures. Motivated readers can obtain a copy of the article from me. Here is its abstract:

Human success in navigating the social world is typically attributed to our capacity to represent other minds—a mentalistic stance. We argue that humans are endowed with a second equally powerful intuitive theory: an institutional stance. In contrast to the mentalistic stance, which helps us predict and explain unconstrained behavior via unobservable mental states, the institutional stance interprets social interactions in terms of role-based structures that constrain and regulate behavior via rule-like behavioral expectations. We argue that this stance is supported by a generative grammar that builds structured models of social collectives, enabling people to rapidly infer, track, and manipulate the social world. The institutional stance emerges early in development and its precursors can be traced across social species, but its full-fledged generative capacity is uniquely human. Once in place, the ability to reason about institutional structures takes on a causal role, allowing people to create and modify social structures, supporting new forms of institutional life. Human social cognition is best understood as an interplay between a system for representing the unconstrained behavior of individuals in terms of minds and a system for representing the constrained behavior of social collectives in terms of institutional structures composed of interlocking sets of roles.

What our brains are doing as we experience musical pleasure.

I've been playing more Schubert lately, drawn by his genius for inserting melodic sections within his piano works (sonatas, impromptus, fantasies, etc.) that give me sheer pleasure when I play them. (When I am beginning to wake in the morning, the passages play in my head and I can visualize both my fingers on the keys and the musical score. As I continue to wake, this all slips away.) 

These experiences made me perk up when I saw the article by Zatorre and collaborators in the Jan. 2026 issue of Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. Here is their abstract (motivated readers can obtain a PDF of the article from me. It has some nice graphics.): 

The enjoyment of music involves a complex interplay between brain perceptual areas and the reward network. While previous studies have shown that musical liking is related to an enhancement of synchronization between the right temporal and frontal brain regions via theta frequency band oscillations, the underlying mechanisms of this interaction remain elusive. Specifically, a causal relationship between theta oscillations and musical pleasure has yet to be shown. In the present study, we address this question by using transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS). Twenty-four participants underwent three different sessions where they received tACS over the right auditory cortex before listening to and rating a set of melodies selected to vary in familiarity and complexity. In the target session, participants received theta stimulation, while in the other two sessions, they received beta and sham stimulation, serving as controls. We recorded brain activity using EEG during task performance to confirm the effects of tACS on oscillatory activity. Results revealed that compared with sham, theta, but not beta, stimulation resulted in higher liking ratings specifically for unfamiliar music with low complexity. In addition, we found increased theta connectivity between the right temporal and frontal electrodes for these stimuli when they were most liked after theta stimulation but not after beta stimulation. These findings support a causal and frequency-specific relationship between music hedonic judgments and theta oscillatory mechanisms that synchronize the right temporal and frontal areas. These mechanisms play a crucial role in different cognitive processes supported by frontotemporal loops, such as auditory working memory and predictive processing, which are fundamental to music reward processing.