Latest / The Nation Podcasts / The Left Doesn't Hate Technology w/ Gita Jackson | Tech Won't Save Us

Transcript

The Left Doesn't Hate Technology w/ Gita Jackson | Tech Won't Save Us · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: the technology itself that comes from these major corporations, they want you to use systems that don't actually work and you they want you to be happy about it and that I think is what leads people to becoming tax pessimists is because you look at the technology that is surrounding you in your life and it's just ceasing to work and it literally feels like it's flipping you awful the time.
• 0:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us Made in Partnership with the Nation magazine.
• 0:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm your host, Paris Mars, and this week my guest is Gita Jackson.
• 0:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: If you're a regular listener of the show, you will probably be familiar with Gita already as they have been a previous guest and also appeared on the end of your live streams that I do, but maybe you also read their work at Aftermath, a great video game and culture news site that if you're not reading right now, you absolutely should.
• 1:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: really I had Gita on this week because they wrote a fantastic piece about why the left doesn't actually hate technology.
• 1:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know the the right is kind of making these arguments at the moment that the left hates technology and hates AI and that means that the right is you know kind of more forward thinking more embracing of the future they are correct and we know that that is not the truth.
• 1:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I figured I needed to have Gita on in order to talk about this.
• 1:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: I thought it was worth having a conversation with Gita, especially to break up our episodes on Jeffrey Epstein.
• 1:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: But whether left doesn't really hate technology, or at least most of the left.
• 1:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the problem is the type of technology that comes out of the system that Silicon Valley has created, but that is associated with.
• 1:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, capitalism and the incentives that come from that system and the type of technology that comes out of that system that then produces tech that You know, works against our interests, right?
• 2:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: That doesn't really serve us and thus as a result We have to push back on we have to fight against to make sure that it's not worsening our living conditions our quality of life our work and all of these sorts of things That of course we're directly seeing with generative AI right now and why it needs to be so vigorously opposed and why the left or
• 2:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: Many people on the left, not everyone, is quite active in doing that, right, in pushing back against generative AI and its larger societal effects.
• 2:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: So that's kind of what we talk about in this conversation, but we also talk about the things that we like about technology and how we want a very different vision.
• 2:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: of what technology is and could be that actually serves us more broadly and that requires rethinking the idea of technology and of digital technology in particular that Silicon Valley has pushed on us for these past few decades that especially in the past few years we have been reaching this moment where we recognize that it is really not working for us and that we need to pull back on that.
• 3:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: So you know that is really the scope of this conversation what we're
• 3:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: someone who likes tech on save us that this is really going to be up your alley and hopefully really resonate with the ways that you are feeling about technology as well.
• 3:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I hope you enjoy the episode.
• 3:18
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• 3:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: and if you do want to support the work that goes into making tech won't save us every single week so we can keep having these critical in-depth conversations about so many aspects of the tech industry and how it affects our society but occasionally these positive ones or at least somewhat positive like this week where we talk about our vision and how we think that something could be different.
• 3:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: So if you do enjoy those things, you can join supporters like Eric from Glendale, California and Varun from Santa Monica, California by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us, where you can become a supporter as well.
• 3:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation.
• 3:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: Gito, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us.
• 4:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hi, it's a pleasure to be back here, I'm so happy to be here.
• 4:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm so excited to talk to you as always.
• 4:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's been far too long since you were on the show, but we have a really good reason to have you back.
• 4:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: Which, of course, as you well know, the left hates technology of all forms.
• 4:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm wondering why you can tell me why the left hates technology so much.
• 4:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, have you ever had a personal consumer grade printer before?
• 4:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: There has been, I think, in the recent round, as Brian, we friend of both of us, Brian merchant pointed out, in the recent round of fundraising for Anthropic.
• 4:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: There has been a sort of meme that has proliferated throughout the internet that an opposition to or support for AI can be something you can predicate along left-right grounds.
• 5:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And based line that is done to argument I agree with because I see people of all stripes, even people who politically are not on my side at all, say that they're grossed out and disgusted by generative AI and the things that it's creates.
• 5:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: And also because like there are dumb leftists that also like this stuff, like it's that tweet, I do not support all of them in some of you bitches are very dumb, that's true of people across the political spectrum.
• 5:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: But also it's something
• 5:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is technology out there that I do enjoy and like using and think could be a net benefit for society.
• 5:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's just that when you when people start talking about technology as a discrete object,
• 5:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Frequently what they mean is the most extractive and most repressive and oppressive technology you could have in this case We're referring to generative AI and AI assistance in companies like ethyropic and open AI who are all I think I can say on the show I think all those companies are evil
• 6:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: Absolutely, 100%.
• 6:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: I just recently wrote as much about OpenAI, but we feel that the same way about the rest of them.
• 6:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's fascinating to me.
• 6:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's many things like a pick-up on in what you just said, and we will get to a lot of it.
• 6:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: But even the term technology, right?
• 6:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: And how it is defined.
• 6:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like for a long time, if you talk to about technology, you basically meant like internet technology, digital technology, right?
• 6:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: any other form of technology was not considered technology did not like fit under the term of what we're talking about when we generally talk about technology because this is what the industry has focused on, this is what the industry is pushing and now it feels like especially in these recent kind of discussions the kind of scope of that term is narrowed even further around generative AI and like what is being pushed in this moment and like it's such a reductive way
• 7:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, look, let's expand the definition of what technology means.
• 7:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: What does innovation mean?
• 7:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think mRNA vaccines are an incredible piece of technology.
• 7:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: A huge, a huge innovation.
• 7:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: I have a bunch of them.
• 7:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I want to get jabbed.
• 7:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let me get jabbed even more.
• 7:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think high-speed rail, the kind that is not being developed, big fan of trains on this podcast.
• 7:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Love that.
• 7:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh my god if I could get to Chicago from New York by train If I could go to Toronto by train, I would be golden.
• 7:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: I would be so happy.
• 7:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: How is there not a high speed train between Toronto and Montreal like this Baffling?
• 7:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: God, you know, it doesn't make any sense.
• 7:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: No, like it.
• 7:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's the perfect corridor for high speed train and high speed transit
• 7:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's also little things that I've been using in my life.
• 7:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: I asked if you're aware of Chris' person from aftermath.
• 7:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: I've, yes.
• 7:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: I can guess on the show.
• 7:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 7:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Totally normal, regular person.
• 7:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chris' person.
• 7:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're recording this episode on his birthday.
• 8:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Happy birthday, Chris.
• 8:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: Happy birthday.
• 8:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and It'd be belated by the time it airs, but you know of course, but you know I think anytime someone says it's your birthday You should count as your birthday.
• 8:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: You should just feel like it's your birthday.
• 8:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: Totally totally You're allowed and we should also celebrate half-word days that that is my thing.
• 8:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: I Yes, you know you mentioned that to me years ago Yeah, I think I had lower self-esteem, but now I'm like yeah, absolutely
• 8:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think you should just have a party whenever you want for whatever reason and everyone should act like it's your birthday.
• 8:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think party fall is also a meaningful piece of technology in my life, you know, like there's little things and there's big things like this.
• 8:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the idea that in order to be in support of technology, you have to be in support of the financial interests of Silicon Valley is what really frustrates me.
• 8:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because when you say technology is AI, is generative AI.
• 8:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is what you essentially are saying.
• 8:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: That the air was a vaccine that just lost funding and will now have to be indefinitely shelved for the Herpes Simplex virus, which would have allowed people to be vaccinated against any derivative virus that it like illnesses caused by herpes, which includes shingles, which I know a lot of people of my generation have because they were encouraged to get chickenpox by their parents who didn't know any better.
• 9:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is technology I would so much rather are government in our economy to vote like oriented stuff around.
• 9:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Instead, we are in this place where as Chris probably mentioned, Ramp heights their food roof, no one can buy a hard drive anymore.
• 9:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're not going to get your fun consumer luxury electronics like a new switch or a new PlayStation.
• 9:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: Don't even try to get that steam machine that Chris is so excited about.
• 9:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm not even coming yet.
• 9:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it's not going to happen now because the entire world's economy is oriented around the finances of like two or three companies that are not even making a product that functions like it makes me it is a very much an emperor's new close moment like the emperor Sam Elpman is out here new to his health and I feel like I'm being forced to tolerate it
• 10:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's wild to me too because like I just came across this study that was like published last year by Open AI itself where they like basically admitted that hallucinations are part of the product like they're not going to come out So it's like the whole notion was these things are going to get better.
• 10:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're going to like get it out of the product at some point But here's Open AI like the leader in the charge for generative AI being like
• 10:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you know that thing where like, you know, the technology that we make that we say is so intelligent and like basically human level smart.
• 10:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's just gonna make things that are wrong all the time because that's built in there.
• 10:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you know, I feel like we keep coming across these cases.
• 10:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: The blogs that I wrote that you read and that you invite me on for the left is in hate technology they hate being We hate we hate being exploited which is in the show and I was for listener.
• 10:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it was a response to a really dumb blog by some random person that I just kept seeing on the timeline And you know what sometimes you read something and it makes you so angry that you write 1,500 words in about half an hour and That is what happened to me where the insistence that the potential for good
• 11:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: that this technology could maybe possibly do in the future is the reason why we have to invest in it now and we were foolish if you're a leftist for not investing in it.
• 11:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is just
• 11:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: speculative at best, you know, like that is something you could speculate about the abilities for AI to cure cancer.
• 11:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: That there's a speculative case you could possibly make.
• 11:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the present right now, AI has caused a school shooting where the casualties were children.
• 11:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were like eight, eight, 12-year-olds died, where multiple children, again, have taken their own lives
• 12:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: QAnon really scared me because I'd never seen something dry people to psychosis like with no previous history of psychosis.
• 12:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: So quickly, AI drives those same kinds of people even faster.
• 12:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's like you get your own personal QAnon when you really get deep into it.
• 12:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there's examples and examples of it not even being able to do its core functionality correctly.
• 12:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: I know that OpenAI has said it's patched the R's and strawberries thing.
• 12:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's all a video of someone a month ago asking OpenAI, asking Chatchy BT, how many ours there are in strawberry and it not being able to answer it correctly.
• 12:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I, you have to be, the word I keep coming back to is credulous.
• 12:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: You have to be a credulous buffoon in order to take these things and then project outward optimistically.
• 12:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: I believe the idea of fully automated luxury communism is something that something I really wished would come to pass.
• 13:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the more we can see the way that this technology interacts with capital interacts with corrupt governance, the more it becomes clear
• 13:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: corporations milking the government for all the money they can get and then not delivering a product as they have done previously in the last 10 years totally and like you know you talk about how you know reading this blog kind of like you know kind of motivated you to to write this blog in response to it and for me like my version of that recently was one seeing Sam Altman say
• 13:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: you know, basically, denigrate humanity and be like, you guys are concerned about the energy and water use of AI.
• 13:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: Have you considered all the energy and water that humans use?
• 13:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's like, dude, what is wrong with you?
• 13:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then for the very next day, as you, as you mentioned there, the Wall Street Journal reporting that open AI, like basically knew this person in British Columbia was planning to do a mass shooting.
• 13:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: And employees inside the company like up to a dozen were debating whether to tell the authorities and ultimately the leadership was like, no, we're not going to tell them.
• 14:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then of course, you know, the person goes on to kill eight people, right?
• 14:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: And now they're trying to like clean up the mess and all that kind of stuff and try to smooth it over.
• 14:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: But this like,
• 14:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: totally incensed me, right?
• 14:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: And if we're going back to talking about like AI as a technology and like, oh my god, we need to adopt this.
• 14:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: We need to put it into like every part of society and oh my god, the left is like so behind because it is not embracing AI like the right and again, we can talk about the distinctions there.
• 14:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: But that argument just seems so fundamentally deeply wrong to me because it's not that the left doesn't understand AI or is an interested in AI.
• 14:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's that we have looked at AI.
• 14:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: We have analyzed what AI is, what generative AI is in particular and have determined that it is like a social cancer and should not be widely adopted.
• 14:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that is the reason why we approach it.
• 15:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: I would even argue that you don't need to have a robust technological understanding of how AI operates and it would be opposed to it because all we have to do is look at how it is being used is being used to eliminate human beings from jobs.
• 15:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's its number one purpose right now and executives who adopted will openly outright say that is that is why they're adopting it.
• 15:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can be opposed to AI on those grounds without understanding how a large language neural network works whatsoever.
• 15:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, even if you don't, she was blackly who, like, was one of the founders of Xbox and someone who I have a weird fondness for on social media because he likes a big bread.
• 15:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: He like went and like baked bread with like four-aged yeast in England.
• 15:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was very cool.
• 15:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think a very cool thing once you stop being a tech executive is just to get really into bread.
• 15:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think that's such a good use of your time.
• 15:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then too, he gave me like a cold interview.
• 15:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: I cold emailed him when I was a baby journalist.
• 15:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I just like, I have a fondness for him now.
• 15:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was so sweet to me and very humble.
• 16:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: But he posted the, a link to this blog, which I think is probably more tech boosty than he intended it.
• 16:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I read it and it's like,
• 16:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: you can write a G, like an LLM in Python in like 43 lines of code.
• 16:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it won't be, it can it'll be an LLM that serves exactly one purpose, probably.
• 16:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: This person wrote it for creating new baby names, like gave it a list of baby names that was like create baby names that are similar to this.
• 16:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: But
• 16:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: The only thing that something like open AI is doing with that basic concept is adding scale to it and that is it and it's it's not it's like once you get it down to it's tiny little like most tiny version of it you really see how much of a shame this entire operation is.
• 16:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: the reason why they insist they need more and more data isn't necessarily because the AI's models are going to get better.
• 16:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: They will all be flawed in the same way, because once you reduce them to their tiniest little form, it shows you exactly how those programs work and that more data does mean anything.
• 17:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: They just want access to copyrighted materials and they want government grants and they want to make multi-million dollar deals with corporations like Disney.
• 17:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's what they want.
• 17:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you don't really need to be technologically savvy to understand how capitalism works.
• 17:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Or even if you don't want to call it capitalism, just call it business.
• 17:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is how business works.
• 17:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Businesses work to create more money for themselves.
• 17:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why would you say well our technology is basically only good for sorting large datasets?
• 17:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's it.
• 17:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: If what you want is millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars.
• 17:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: Totally, and, you know, this is also why they're building out this massive infrastructure, right?
• 17:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: Because they're trying to cement this idea of what technology is.
• 17:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, this notion that we need to all be a reliant on generative AI models, on chat pots, on image generators, and all this kind of a thing, right?
• 17:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is going to be a core feature of technology going forward, and everybody has to adopt it.
• 18:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: And of course, now we're in the moment where Open AI is losing money, anthropic is losing money.
• 18:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: you know, I'm sure Google, Microsoft are losing money on these products, but the idea is, we are going to lock you in to using generative AI.
• 18:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then once you are dependent on it, once you have built it into the way that your company operates, the way that you was an individual, kind of, you know, leave your life or do your job or what have you, then we're going to jack the price.
• 18:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: And because you are dependent on this technology now, you're just going to have to figure out how to pay for it.
• 18:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: You're not going to be able to like fully pull yourself off of it.
• 18:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's like, this is a tactic that we have seen so many times in the past with the tech industry.
• 18:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is how they work and it's like we feel baffled that they're doing this again, you know.
• 18:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, it reminds me of the, my first foreign to the job market was in the, the height of the millennial optimism, like movement, where we all wanted to work mission base jobs and wouldn't it so, so wouldn't, isn't it crazy how all these tech sector jobs, all insist that they're going to change the world, like,
• 19:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Suddenly, you can, people forget that you can lie.
• 19:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's like something that comes to mind frequently when I see the way these companies talk about themselves and what they want this technology to do for the world.
• 19:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why would you tell the truth when you get money for lying?
• 19:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: really, really, really frustrated me.
• 19:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: The same playbook happens with, like, we work.
• 19:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: We work position itself as a tech company.
• 19:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why?
• 19:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because when you say you're a tech company, you become eligible for a lot of grants and a huge valuation when you go, go public with your IPO, or whatever, business words, business words.
• 19:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: But
• 19:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: you if you say that we're going to revolutionize the world we are a tech company how we are tech company is not really clear and we're going to do something so fundamental that you want to get in on the ground floor as the economy reorient itself around we work as a business you can just say that stuff
• 19:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can literally just say it, and historically, it will work out great for you, Uber and Lyft also do these things, NFTs, crypto currencies, they all said these things, but they are not actually changing the world.
• 20:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: They never did any of that thing.
• 20:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: They enriched a small number of people, and that is exactly what is going to happen here, and is in fact currently happening.
• 20:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: absolutely and you know only the biggest players can get in and even participate right it's like Sam Altman is on his quest to become one of these like dominant figures of Silicon Valley but like what other good is actually going to come out and that's not even a good like you know that's just Sam Altman kind of carving out his space right but like
• 20:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: What else is really going to come of this other than the cementing of the power of these massive tech companies?
• 20:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, sure you might get like open AI sort of added on to the side.
• 20:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: But even then it's like highly dependent on the cloud services of Microsoft and Google, and I guess Oracle now or whatever.
• 20:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: But it's like, you know, they're still all tied together.
• 20:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: You still have the major players who are there.
• 20:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: I remember, do you remember early on in the AI wave when there was all this discussion about how open AI was presenting this massive threat to Google?
• 21:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's like,
• 21:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: At the time, I even wrote a piece being like this makes no sense, but it's so funny to me in hindsight that that was like the early argument because it was so clearly like not going to displace Google from where it is and how Google is like again more powerful than it's ever been.
• 21:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you know, it's Google School's fucking Gemini.
• 21:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: I had to go deep in my Gmail, again, a technology that I like because it makes it easy for me to communicate with people around the globe.
• 21:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: I had to go deep into my Gmail settings so that Gmail wouldn't write emails for me.
• 21:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it was a important email to an editor that I was writing.
• 21:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I pressed reply to this email and it had a draft filled out for me.
• 21:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, I was disgusted.
• 21:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: It made me want to shoot my computer with the handgun.
• 21:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: I felt like weirdly betrayed.
• 21:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is supposed to be a technology that just works.
• 21:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And what doesn't help me is when you're doing the communication for me.
• 21:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's my job.
• 21:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm a writer.
• 21:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Don't you think that chop away for me?
• 22:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it's also like, it has become
• 22:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: such an obvious fad in trend that it just makes me really angry sometimes.
• 22:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, when I use these devices that I've used every day, I've talked with Chris a lot about the idea of I'm wearing my fucking Johnny Silver handy shirt as I was, but my the idea of looking back to this type of public like Hacker, ethos, the 90s Hacker Monset mindset and thinking, where did we go wrong from here?
• 22:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: like if you read the cyberpunk 2020 and a rule book for the tabletop game you can see like my pondsmith worked at Microsoft it's a really built-in and personal resentment of those corporations there was a basic distrust of corporations that existed
• 22:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now I feel like everyone has kind of just given up on this idea that you can resist them.
• 22:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: But there is a lot of like cool gadgetry that exists and exists outside of these wheelhouses.
• 23:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And like, I'm like seconds away from becoming a Linux person at this point.
• 23:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm so disgusted with these technologies.
• 23:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are alternate ways for us to live and be technological, technological, and also
• 23:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: engage and be participate in society without having to like the fucking line up and suck at the teeth of Bill Gates.
• 23:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like there's no weed.
• 23:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: I do not like that image.
• 23:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't appreciate that.
• 23:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: I know, I was disgusted with myself as I was saying, but I was like, there's no other way for me to describe how to, like, it, I feel repulsed by this.
• 23:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's so many things that Microsoft does.
• 23:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not to mention, like, the BDS boycott of, like, Microsoft product projects.
• 23:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I,
• 23:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the longer this goes on some more, I'm actually realizing like I actually really love tech and for that reason I want to return to like a personal non corporate and modular experience of technology that I used to have that people used to be very excited about.
• 24:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, I wrote a blog which we mentioned earlier about my little NPC player that I bought, right?
• 24:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, I did a little audio player.
• 24:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's like a really fun new hobbyist space that I'm really enjoying.
• 24:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm actually about to write a blog.
• 24:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: People have started making themes for that specific NPC player I bought, the Snow Skies, File Mini, and they're like, someone made
• 24:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: theme, basically.
• 24:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Someone made it, so it's just a video, like an FMV of a tape going into a tape deck, and then every time you push a button it animates like the different buttons of the tape deck.
• 24:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's just like, people used to have fun, like, feeling around with their tech and making it personal to them.
• 24:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: People used to show off, like their hacked iPods, and like, all the random things they do to make their tech personal and a part of them, and not an expression of their
• 24:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now what I see is like, you go online and people want the technology itself that comes from these major corporations.
• 25:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: They want you to use systems that don't actually work.
• 25:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they want you to be happy about it.
• 25:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that I think is what leads people to becoming tax pessimists is because you look at the technology that is surrounding you in your life.
• 25:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's just ceasing to work.
• 25:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: totally like I could not agree more right I feel like I hate tech in the sense of like the industry that is known as tech but like technology itself is like so fascinating right you know even earlier you were talking about the trains and you know we could add like renewable technology and like battery technology and like all this stuff that is like so fascinating and so cool and like
• 25:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: Changing so much, but I feel like I'm kind of coming around to this view like as I think about this more and more that I feel like the smartphone was in some senses of mistake not that I think that We all need to give up our smartphones because it feels like it's so like built into life in 2026, you know like you kind of need it to to get by but it's like the idea that
• 26:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: Everything or like virtually everything should be done by this single device that is in the corporate interest for these companies to make us feel that this needs to be the center of our lives both digital and physical.
• 26:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think was a mistake and I think is something that like I'm increasingly challenging, but that I'm seeing more and more people be like.
• 26:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: We need to take a step back from this and it is gone way too far.
• 26:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: I completely agree.
• 26:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: I completely agree on that point.
• 26:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can see a lot, like the smartphone was maybe the first time I really like embodied and embraced tech, techno optimism as like a person, like an autonomous person.
• 26:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was in college, it was like, I was no longer under my parents' roof.
• 27:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was the fucking Obama era.
• 27:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was like, I fones, give them to me.
• 27:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: I used to watch the Apple keynote, you know?
• 27:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Me too.
• 27:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh my God.
• 27:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: I loved them, the spectacle of them, and it felt like they were giving us candy.
• 27:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Totally.
• 27:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: It felt amazing.
• 27:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: But when I look, I think it was probably around the existence of Spotify, where you begin to see what the real mission of the smartphone is.
• 27:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the mission of the smartphone is become addicted to this device.
• 27:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, that's it.
• 27:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: re-orienting highlights into music so that I am buying MP3's largely from band camp occasionally from iTunes when the artist is big enough like too big for band camp.
• 27:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And physically putting them on a memory card and listening to music that way has made it so that I discover more music, listen to more of my existing library, and have like a more intimate connection to the music that I listen to, to this device.
• 27:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: I hardly ever use my phone to listen to music when I'm on the go anymore because it's also just a worse device for listening to music when you when you stream things you're compressing them so much the music sounds way worse and there's like literally nothing worse than being underground on the subway and you're in the middle of a song and it cuts out like it makes me
• 28:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: angry, like it makes me mad.
• 28:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then the MP3 player, you don't have to load anything.
• 28:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't have to connect in the internet.
• 28:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: That, and I have Chris wrote a blog about this, too.
• 28:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: The books, Palma, it is a phone size MP3 player.
• 28:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not MP3 player, E reader.
• 28:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is an E ink, cell phone size device.
• 28:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: It can connect to the internet, no cell phone signal.
• 28:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I downloaded Libby on it, which is the library app.
• 28:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I am reading so many library books now.
• 28:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is a feast.
• 28:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: I go, I went to the strand downtown.
• 28:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: and I saw a bunch of books I wanted to buy and instead again I'm using I signed up for story graph on recommendation of Molly from citation needed, Molly White and you can just take a picture of a book that way and I added it to my two-be read list on story graph.
• 29:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then I checked them all out for the library.
• 29:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it just made me feel like I'm actually invested in my literal local community, right?
• 29:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: The library, cards I use to set up for Libby comes from the library that is down the block for me.
• 29:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's a real physical location.
• 29:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm invested into a system that needs my support and is local to me and I'm using technology to bolster to that connection to my specific community.
• 29:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: I buy my friends albums on bank camp and I put them on my MP3 player.
• 29:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: I am not just like...
• 29:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: being flung around by an algorithm.
• 29:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: I am no longer chained to a device that tells me what I can or cannot do.
• 29:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can see this a lot in game dev also.
• 29:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: I know a lot of independent game developers who develops a for mobile.
• 29:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: They hate working with Apple.
• 29:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because Apple has made it very clear that they do not think of games as art and they will shit like expel you from their walls garden at any time they want basically within you have no ability to argue with them.
• 30:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: If I could have a Game Boy size device where I could play it like all my mobile games on them, I would never download anything in the app store ever again.
• 30:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you can really feel how much you rely on this piece of shit when you try to divest from it and you understand that it wasn't better or was just convenient.
• 30:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that is like, again, what open AI is trying to do.
• 30:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, I have Gemini's made its worst way into my fucking email.
• 30:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: I can't go on Google without getting an AI summary.
• 30:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: They want these things to be ubiquitous so that we don't remember what it's like to not use them.
• 30:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I do.
• 30:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: I do.
• 30:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I remember when you could search things on Google and you would find what you were looking for.
• 30:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh my god, like I'm resonating so much with like everything that you're saying like I feel like my motto lately And I've said this to a few people is basically just like I hate phone like I'm so done.
• 30:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: I hate phone I'm so done with it.
• 30:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, I'm like in obviously still have it, you know Because I travel for work and blah, blah, blah There's shit that I need on the phone, but it's like I don't want to use the phone
• 31:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't want it to be like the center of my life, of my existence to be this thing that I'm like so dependent on.
• 31:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you know, I've talked about this with Liz Pele on the show in the past who wrote this fantastic book about Spotify, about how like I noticed.
• 31:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: And obviously there were other things going on in my life, you know, I was going to university, I was getting busier, all this kind of stuff, but like when Spotify entered my life, the way that I related to music changed a lot.
• 31:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: In the sense that I was not like,
• 31:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: seeking out new music as much anymore, you know, I was not trying to discover what was out there.
• 31:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: I was just kind of like being served up what was given to me, listening to things that I had listened to in the past, which in here, I think that second piece is not inherently bad, right?
• 31:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: I, you know, if there's stuff that you like,
• 31:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: it's fine to keep listening to it, you know, well into, you know, the later parts of your life were whatnot, right?
• 31:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's totally all good.
• 32:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I still do a plenty of that.
• 32:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I felt that I was like really missing out on discovering new things, on finding new music, and that always kind of disappointed me.
• 32:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: But
• 32:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: Unfortunately, I was like so busy that I never really tried to go see how to do something different.
• 32:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: And again, it comes back to what you're saying about the convenience, right?
• 32:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was like it was very convenient to use these services.
• 32:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, and I still have a streaming service at the moment.
• 32:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I, you know, I have these are, which is a French streaming service because I haven't made the full step that you've made yet, but I have an iPod Classic that
• 32:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm planning to mod but I've just been too busy to do it so far and I'm going to stick rockbox on it and I can't wait to see all the different themes and stuff, you know, saying like you were saying about your digital audio player, but I feel like the piece that really resonated with me from what you were saying was there are these devices where
• 32:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: Maybe they can connect to the internet, right?
• 32:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: If you're talking about the books Palma, but the fact that they can connect to the internet is not like the key kind of component of what they are.
• 33:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's like they are doing a specific thing.
• 33:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: Maybe you can connect the internet to get something, but that kind of constant connection to the internet is not key to what is happening there.
• 33:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I feel like that is like something that is really distinct in the gadgets and the type of technology that has been really pushed on us for the past couple decades now basically.
• 33:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: Since the smartphone really, one of the things that you stand out to me, and I'm sure some like,
• 33:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: listeners who are more familiar with Japan will be like, oh, you're misunderstanding it.
• 33:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: But like, when I would go to Japan, I would notice that or like learn about Japan, they would have all these gadgets, right?
• 33:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: They would have all these different technologies, all these unique little things, but the fact that like, so few of them seem to be connected to the internet.
• 33:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like, that was not a key piece of the gadgetry that was happening there.
• 33:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: And as
• 33:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: In North America in Europe, we converted to like everything needs an internet connection, you know, everything needs to be connected.
• 33:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: Everything needs to be producing data for these companies to like absorb.
• 33:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: It felt like that kind of piece of it never fully like took hold over there in a way.
• 34:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it feels like one of the things that I find exciting is like,
• 34:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: going back to gadgets that again are not centered around the internet and are doing specific things and doing them well in the way that you were saying.
• 34:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, like a modular personal cyberpunk for such a relationship to technology where each piece can be removed.
• 34:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not like I have to upgrade my entire phone.
• 34:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: If one aspect of it isn't working in the way that I want it to, I so love the books, Palma.
• 34:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: I can do some basic like browsing, but even a lot of most websites
• 34:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love it.
• 34:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love the eating screen and eating screens are only getting better and smaller and more compact.
• 34:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're all going to have the shell shaped e-reader from it followed by it in the decade.
• 34:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: I really feel that's true.
• 34:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: I do think also you're correct.
• 34:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: I look at where a lot of the technology that I do like like consumer technology I like is coming from.
• 34:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Almost exclusively it's stuff from Japan and China, especially China.
• 35:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: All the really cute
• 35:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: little digital audio players are seeing.
• 35:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're all from Chinese companies and they're fantastic.
• 35:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: They are kind of still chasing the utility of the iPod, but they don't make the iPod anymore.
• 35:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that's why these companies exist.
• 35:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: But even then you look at things like dumb phones.
• 35:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: The flip phone kosher lasted for so much longer in Japan because not everyone thought you needed one in order They needed a phone to be on the internet for all the time.
• 35:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, like a lot of people were happy playing really lightweight mobile games on their flip phones and Like that's why those markets like they were still producing new where I'm better kinds of flip phones and bar phones And I think that it is lucky that that technology persisted because now we are seeing a renewed interest in
• 35:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: divesting from having in everything walks, essentially.
• 35:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's interesting to think about how the difference between discoverability of music changed before and after Spotify.
• 35:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: But before Spotify, I really was like a music blog person.
• 36:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was reading Brooklyn vegan.
• 36:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, I was reading all these different human curators of music.
• 36:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: My favorite was the bunny head.
• 36:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the bunny head is now become like they only do socialist memes on Instagram now.
• 36:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, I mean, a great turn, great turn for them, love that.
• 36:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I really relied on human beings to tell me what bands were good and bad.
• 36:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: The body head is where I discovered the band girls for the first time, and they had that really beautiful first album that I loved.
• 36:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then after that, it was really like I was...
• 36:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, the first time I heard Nicki Minaj, the first time I heard Eddie Bitty Piggy, it was because a human being recommended Nicki Minaj to me.
• 36:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now I feel like if you're hearing a new song for the first time, it's because the algorithm added it to whatever playlist.
• 36:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that is really disturbing to me.
• 36:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is, but in the same way, it's like everything else.
• 36:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: New again, I remember growing up.
• 36:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we had a really, really good rock radio station, radio, what a four.
• 37:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Got a bit of heart for Connecticut.
• 37:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it was really good.
• 37:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: My brother's music tastes as a 100% a result of that radio station.
• 37:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: They had a local music festival.
• 37:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: They would host every year.
• 37:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then when I got to high school, they got bought by a clear channel.
• 37:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then they started to just suck ass.
• 37:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And like, they were, they used to be like a really anti-nickle back, I'm sorry, I know you're in there.
• 37:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: So they were, I, when I was younger, I actually saw a nickle back in constant, uh, yeah.
• 37:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wow, I, well, listen, here we go.
• 37:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: My first concert was Hanson, because I loved those three little blonde boys, and they love Jesus.
• 37:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: I had, I had, I had burned CDs of nickel back music.
• 37:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wow.
• 37:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 37:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: No one else like handsome like I did so that's what I think I had I think I had a handsome I had some CD Yeah, you know, I was just a I was a rock chick.
• 37:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was born to be a rock chick So handsome is like you are in the kitty pool of rock music similar similar to Nickelback for sure for sure but it was a
• 38:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, the radio 104 went from like a we do not play nickel back because we human curators of music have taste to this is our clear channel mandated playlist and we cannot not play any songs from it.
• 38:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that you I mean when you look at the way the world is right now where really regressive like fascist forces are trying to close culture down around you.
• 38:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: and make it possible or impossible to say certain things, even every time I see someone saying, on a live, I want to unlive myself.
• 38:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't, I don't have suicidal urges, but it's funny thing to say.
• 38:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it's, it is,
• 38:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: These corporations have learned that when you have total buy in from everybody and if you can make that impossible for people to not use your product, you determine what culture is you just do and I I think if there's one thing I need we need to remember from our gen X brethren it's Nirvana going on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine wearing a shirt that says corporate music media still sucks.
• 39:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: like these things suck.
• 39:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: We don't have to happily participate in this.
• 39:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: If they're going to drag us along, let it be kicking and screaming.
• 39:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, I want to make it as difficult as possible for a corporation to extract value for me.
• 39:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: I do not want to just lay down and be like, well, okay, if AI is the future, I guess is the future.
• 39:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: No, you're going to have to make me, you're like, put a gun to my head, I'm a salmonman with your blue little forearms.
• 39:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: But like a total, and one of the things that makes me really excited recently is seeing this like renewal of physical media, of bookstores, of there's this article in the New York Times recently about younger people kind of bringing back.
• 39:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: video rental stores.
• 39:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: These things didn't suck.
• 39:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: They were dismissed because there was a lot of excitement around the convenience of the internet and services delivered through it, that were not always better than what existed before.
• 40:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: And now, it feels like there are people being like, you know what?
• 40:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: We kind of like this experience.
• 40:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: Sure, maybe it wasn't as profitable as what was possible by making these massive platforms.
• 40:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: But there's still a role in communities
• 40:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: these types of physical space is certainly record stores and music stores and things like that, right?
• 40:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I'm in like, you know, it's not a complete thing at the moment, but I'm in a massive process of shifting back to like, I like buying blue rays.
• 40:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: I have a bunch of physical books.
• 40:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: I am thinking about buying a record player and having some mix of like CDs and vinyl and stuff.
• 40:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you know, I'm just living this life.
• 40:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm trying it out.
• 40:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm seeing how it goes, but
• 40:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like I was saying, I want to retreat more and more from this idea that this one device is to go back to Brian Martins' book about the iPhone is going to be so key to our lives and to everything that's happening.
• 41:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: And on that point, I was interested in asking you because he brought it up and you mentioned it in your piece, but I was also a big techno optimist for a while, and I know that you've written about being one as well.
• 41:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: I was wondering if you could talk to me
• 41:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: like being a techno-opponist, being very optimistic about what this technology was going to deliver to us and shifting away from that.
• 41:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, I'm so glad you're asking that because I feel like in the piece it's not the point of it and I didn't get a chance to fully explain my journey so my parents are both like old hippies.
• 41:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I always like that the household was always going to be a left-wing household, you know, my parents didn't want to indoctrinate us, but they allowed a lot of space for us to ask questions like, why does everybody need money?
• 41:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why do why are some people poor?
• 41:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: and stuff like that.
• 41:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were generally in support of me and my brother becoming politically active and especially for me, like during, I mean none of us knew what was going to happen with Obama and that was my freshman year of college and they had, have you from the campaign come out to Overland College and put us on buses and say, let's go, you're going to go canvas in the neighborhood and let's go do it and I, I participated in that, you know?
• 42:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: it was impossible not to get swept up in that emotion and my parents who are more left wing than that, they also wanted to black president, right?
• 42:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like even if he didn't align a hundred percent on their views and their values, it is like my dad grew up in the Jim Crow South.
• 42:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, like I called him crying when it happened.
• 42:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, it is a it was a moment that
• 42:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: feels emotionally resonant even though I now hate Barack Obama with my life.
• 42:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: But at the time, like I was adding on to that, my dad's career is in IT.
• 42:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: So my mother got a, there's a tenorship at a college and he up until a few years ago before when he retired, worked in IT as a PC specialist.
• 42:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: So for me and for him hand in hand with our liberation,
• 43:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: from an oppressive government was an excitement for the communication networks that the internet could provide.
• 43:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: We got a modem before anyone else I knew.
• 43:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I was just a sponge for information.
• 43:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: The idea that I could talk to people from other countries who live totally different lives for me, I completely ate all that up.
• 43:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: I made friends as an awkward teenager kind of for the first time with the aid of the internet.
• 43:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it introduced me to more joy, more discovery, more books, more movies, more kinds of people.
• 43:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was deep in the fucking like internet piracy game too, so I was voraciously like,
• 43:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: downloading and more information more art to me that is what technology meant was just a window into uh I downloaded a torn of stranger things that I was in college because it wasn't available anywhere and so I felt like I was doing some kind of magic spell that allowed me to have access to culture that had otherwise disappeared.
• 44:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: I remember being like in Eastern Europe and downloading a torrent of house of cards to watch like the season or second season or something like that, like this was back in 2013 or something yet.
• 44:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: I meant strange days, not strange or things, but it's been a long way better than those two leaders and I was like, but yeah, I remember fresh in your college, I was downloading fan subs of the anime Madacomagica in my dorm room every Sunday.
• 44:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: hungover before I went to the dining hall.
• 44:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I was just like, this to me, and what was so cute is the fan subbers like left in one commercial every episode because they thought the commercial was so funny.
• 44:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was where a drink called morning rescue.
• 44:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I always show like a sad office worker, exhausted, and then wrestling.
• 44:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Our emergency like nine one one firefighter people going into a
• 45:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was just cute like people did that right like I do when being made that choice I felt connected to those people I felt like I was participating in a special community by watching that show the internet is what made it possible And it was like a little transgressive too.
• 45:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm stealing.
• 45:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ooh almost fine pirate by the time I graduate from college though
• 45:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: made it become clear the major corporations understood what that optimism was and wanted this workforce that was now really super jobless and around to buy in hook line and sinker to what they were offering as employees right so you got all these tech companies saying we're going to change the world and I I did
• 45:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: want to believe that companies like Uber and Lyft and Airbnb and we work could affect the market in ways that made things more fair.
• 46:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: But as my cynicism with Obama grew, so did my cynicism with what these corporations were saying.
• 46:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think it was around the time Lyft was offering loans for it was Uber offering loans for drivers to buy cars, where I was like okay so now you
• 46:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: That just sounds like script to me.
• 46:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: That sounds like you're, but you're bisoning the company store.
• 46:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're relying on this company to buy a car for you, on a loan that they finance for you, and you have to pay that loan back with the wages you earn from driving that car.
• 46:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tell me how that makes sense.
• 46:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: And if I remember the interest rates were like kind of ridiculous.
• 46:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, if I remember correctly as well, I remember like arguing with someone my own age about this and being like yes it's good that these people have access to transportation, but you have to understand like the that it makes lift and charge of their whole life they might as well move to a company town and people were like no but they're they're providing things for you you bottle of taxis are bad and in some places it's really difficult to get one and it's like that is true and I do think some things about the hotel and taxi lobby needed to be broken up.
• 47:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it doesn't mean just handing control to another corporation.
• 47:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, there needs to be a diversified market if we want to still believe that capitalism works.
• 47:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this is when I started really doubting that capitalism worked, you know?
• 47:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think it was becoming so invested in Silicon Valley and all the things they said they could do for us.
• 47:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then seeing how they just consolidated money and power for themselves where I was really just, I became a cynic.
• 47:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I became
• 47:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: pessimistic about all of these things and I became angry because they they lied and there was no consequence that was like the scales had followed from my eyes.
• 47:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: I can no longer take anything tech corporation says in good faith because I look at the humble beginnings of something like Amazon as a bookstore and I see Jeff Fazos renting out a town for his stupid wedding.
• 48:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now and like that's
• 48:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's what they all want to do, line go up until you're the richest man in the world.
• 48:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: Totally.
• 48:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's fascinating to me to hear your story because I feel like it mirrors so closely my own as well.
• 48:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: Obviously, I love the early internet too.
• 48:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: I love going on to all these forums.
• 48:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: I love being able to rip music and get movies and shows and like all this kind of stuff, right?
• 48:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: And
• 48:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: There was the piece of the 2010s and seeing the discourse around AI and stuff that really radicalized me.
• 48:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the kind of fully automated communism stuff of how it's going to destroy all the jobs.
• 48:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: But then we can use the technology to free us and blah, blah, blah, and how it actually just meant like algorithm management and more pressure on workers.
• 48:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the piece that even kind of came before that was Uber, really, and the gig economy.
• 48:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that was, for me, it was like,
• 48:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: no this is like this is like terrible and it's being sold as like liberation and freedom and this is just crazy to me.
• 49:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: I was observing it but then also reading the work of like people who did great analysis of this like you know Hubert Horan of course who is like you know one of the like original Hubert critics who who did this so well but yeah it was just like that was like a real turning point for me and a real moment of like
• 49:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: wake up to what is really going on here and like have this industry works and you know the kind of extraction and control and whatnot that is so that this whole industry is wrapped up in and I'm sure like you know the Snowden revelations and stuff played into that as well it was like you know because there's so many discourses around technology that are like it's so liberatory and blah blah blah and then you look at it and it's like
• 49:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: No, this is like private companies building out a surveillance network that then the state can piggybacked off of.
• 49:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: And we're supposed to act like the government is the bad guy, but the tech companies are the good guys, like what is going on, you know?
• 49:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly, you know, and it's also a library for whom, right?
• 49:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is it literally for the workers in Africa that have to look at extremely triggering material all day long?
• 50:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: in order to trade these algorithms is a laboratory for any nation in Africa where they pay the mind the minerals that are necessary for building computers and then these countries are not asked to share in the profits whatsoever.
• 50:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is it laboratory for the small towns or these data centers are being built where their water and air is being poisoned?
• 50:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Who is it laboratory for?
• 50:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then you understand what class struggle is, right?
• 50:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: You understand there's workers
• 50:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think being on the aspect room can help a little bit here, where it's just like, will you understand binaries thinking in that absolute, if that if you understand that nuance is there, but it doesn't matter really, then you really see the entire world for what it is.
• 50:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is a small, small class of people that are at the top, and they want to change the world so that everything funnels towards them, and we are their surfs.
• 50:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: We are in a fiefdom, we leave underneath them.
• 50:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: I have this novel idea years and years ago, and don't steal it, in case I ever end up writing this but I don't know if I have the ability.
• 51:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it was like a game of throne style, like dark medieval fantasy, where this is succession crisis, but the longer you read the story, you realize that this is like,
• 51:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: the fantasy like reddit island that people have like like so so cowl and parts of the bay area have like broken off from the United States and the created like a fucked up feudal island and it's just reveredverted into the worst most disastrous form of surfdom that could possibly exist because that's what they want.
• 51:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: You look a Peter too.
• 51:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Peter, he feels like a scholar tour, and that is the future that he wants to bring into the world.
• 51:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, you don't even need like the fucking F-scene files to understand that all these people are in Kahootz, because if you look at the way that they position, the works that they put out into the world, it's you need us and fuck you.
• 51:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think this is a really good, actually way to pivot to the final thing that I wanted to bring up, which is going back to the core of what I wanted to have you on the show to talk about is like, this notion that the left hates technology and the right is like totally on board with AI, right?
• 52:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: And we've talked about how the first premise of that is completely flawed because we do like technology.
• 52:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: We just don't like the corporate technology that's being pushed at us that is so extractive
• 52:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: negative effects that we're very clearly seeing and that generative AI just like kind of really puts You know very clearly, right, but then there's the other piece of that argument which is like The right loves techno loves AI though, right and it's like to me I feel like there's two segments of that where on the one hand, it's like
• 52:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, there's a lot of people who are both in tech or who are like, you know, kind of like vehicles of capital, who has surely loved AI because, you know, it like serves their interests in many ways.
• 52:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: But then there's this other segment of the right as well, like, you know, the whole Steve Bannonite, like a lot of the mega movement that actually hates AI too.
• 53:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: Um, what are you talking about that?
• 53:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, yeah, the idea that you can determine what someone's feelings on AI based on a left-right basis is completely first school, right?
• 53:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: One, because the people that work in Silicon Valley are incredibly slippery about what their actual politics are, I remember, of course, in during my tech optimist phase, they'd position themselves as left-wing.
• 53:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: They would say, this is liberatory.
• 53:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is about empowering working people.
• 53:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: They all are bus words, they all knew.
• 53:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not like secret knowledge, and then they used it as marketing against me.
• 53:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's difficult to think of them of having a politics that is based around anything other than the self.
• 53:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when you look at that big picture, yeah, that is a right wing that is a right-leading world view.
• 53:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: but it is not right wing in terms of the way that American politics works.
• 53:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: They are not socially or culturally right wing.
• 54:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: They are specifically economically right wing and fuck everything else.
• 54:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: They don't really have a feeling on it.
• 54:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: In fact, I would say there's socially a culturally left wing only in the sense that they hate artists.
• 54:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: for whatever reason.
• 54:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: They hate you if you're an artist, they hate you if you're a working artist and they think your talent is unfair, which you can only explain as bold face jealousy, like in the same way that Ben Shapiro is jealous of every screenwriter that got work because he comes from a Hollywood family and nobody wanted his screenplays anyway.
• 54:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: They seem to think about how like this is probably a bad maybe I shouldn't even go into this direction But like how Hitler used to like be obsessed with Disney and like use the paint and stuff and it's like I can do this.
• 54:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'll just be a fascist dictator and kill a bunch of people Benchapera has the same art.
• 54:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's crazy though.
• 54:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like it is
• 54:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: For me, it is the best argument for universal basic income.
• 54:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: I can possibly think of like, what if Ben Shapiro really should just get just the bonus apps and write his bad screenplay?
• 55:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: We wouldn't have to hear from him.
• 55:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, he could just get his dumb bad act.
• 55:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Him and Kevin Sorbo could make all the stupid movies they want.
• 55:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they would have a happy life because they wouldn't need to make money to live.
• 55:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: He wouldn't have to sell multi-million dollars screenplay in Hollywood.
• 55:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: In order to have his dreams fulfilled, he could just make a movie and not bother the rest of us.
• 55:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: When you look at the right-wing people that love AI, they are in the same class where it's like a...
• 55:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: I wouldn't even call them crypto-fascists.
• 55:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're just libertarians.
• 55:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that is like, you can't actually did libertarians, those same way you treat like a crypto-fascist.
• 55:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're just dumb people.
• 55:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think, came out of my mouth before I was just thinking about it, but it's true, like, Oh, it is true.
• 55:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 55:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: No, like, ask any libertarian what they think should happen to people with physical disabilities.
• 55:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then you'll figure out that they haven't really, they either are evil or haven't thought about it.
• 56:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And like, that's that's how you know if there are a good or a good person or a person that's evil.
• 56:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whereas where you look at like the the White House loves AI because they know the left hates it.
• 56:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's all about politics of grievance, you know, they love using AI generated bullshit because they know it pisses off their biggest critics.
• 56:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's why they keep using pop star songs and their stupid TikToks and stuff because they know that these pop stars really hate it when they do that.
• 56:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: And also because Trump can stand next to some executives who say they're going to pour a bunch of money into building stuff and creating jobs and whatnot, you know.
• 56:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 56:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
• 56:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's, if you look though at someone like a band and figure, that's someone who really deeply understands technology and has for a very long time been on the sides of all the worst parts of it, like hiring impoverished people in the global south to mind for gold on World of Warcraft, which is like, what are the more evil things you can do, I think.
• 57:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to start with my with literals human slavery and work up to more different versions of human slavery, essentially, yeah, like he understands what's bad about AI in the sense that he understands that this puts power in the control of Sam Altman when he wants power in the control of him personally, you can't look at right when critique of AI as being populace they're all about power going to the wrong people.
• 57:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: But they do exist, right?
• 57:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is actually pretty difficult to find a politician on any side of anything who embraces AI in terms of, like, in our everyday lives.
• 57:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: They too have concerns about regular people being able to get jobs.
• 57:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it doesn't really have anything to do with, like, artsy, fartsy writers or anything.
• 57:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: But just like, is a normal person going to be able to go to work at work a job?
• 58:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they are right word critiques of this, mostly because they are critiques of the tech sectors entanglement with the US government.
• 58:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like there's a lot of just trust in mistrust there.
• 58:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: But again, that is just about literally
• 58:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: we don't want those libertarian freaks to have all the money and all the power.
• 58:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then a guy on the left, like I think that people say, think that if you are a leftist, you are inherently against AI, there are a bunch of liberals who kind of don't care, right?
• 58:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 58:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: There are also a bunch of leftists who like, actually love AI.
• 58:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like, I know it leftists last year who were like, you know, I won't use the American AI, but the Chinese make AI too, and I love it, you know?
• 58:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's like,
• 58:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: I know, I like, I don't, what are you getting out of it?
• 58:49
  [UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
• 58:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, I, that's my big question is like, what are you, what are you getting out of this?
• 58:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: What is it, grant Morrison is another person that loves AI?
• 58:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I love their comic work.
• 58:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that they generally have a pretty good politic about understanding how power flows, like the big diverses, the little guys, and escapable when you are a comic book writer, but they're obsessed with the idea
• 59:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Dolly and making Dolly art because they have always been interested in this idea of the collective unconscious and they see AI as a representative of that I understand that, but it's also like do the Dolly art is bad You know so many cool artists that you could just send a bunch of gibberish to it They draw it for you.
• 59:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Great.
• 59:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Come on, please Can I please it's I I saw that um
• 59:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: What's her name?
• 59:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: The wrote Fun Home.
• 59:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: She used AI to help her compose the comics for the New Yorker and I think with certain people they are just lazy like I do think certain people are just lazy and do want to take that shortcut and I don't know how to tell people not to other than I believe in the actual immortal soul and I do think you're hurting your soul.
• 1:00:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like I've become like a real, I saw the testament of Anne Lee and it changed some things for me like I do think work is like a work in labor doing things physically with your body is thinking with your real brain and not outsourcing those thoughts I do think those are enriching and I do think you should embrace the difficulty that comes from things but if you're a boomer man I get it we just don't want to do things anymore your old you would time for you to retire you're a gen X you're getting up there too sorry buddy, but
• 1:00:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: What's true?
• 1:00:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: The tech industry found religion in like trying to create the AGI god and destroy the world in the process.
• 1:00:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: The left found found religion in the soul is real.
• 1:00:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: The soul matters.
• 1:00:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: We need to embrace creativity and our and I think that's much that's a much better way to embrace faith and spirituality than whatever the tech creators are doing.
• 1:00:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: I feel like we are adding closer and closer to making the world a final fantasy seven real and we're all going to have to get together and kill God.
• 1:01:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: We got to do it.
• 1:01:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: I want to do it.
• 1:01:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sephiroth is is a chat GPT and we're gonna have to shoot him with a gun like the but Larry and G-Hod is coming.
• 1:01:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: It has to happen.
• 1:01:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're getting there.
• 1:01:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're getting there for sure.
• 1:01:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: Gita, this was such a fun conversation.
• 1:01:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think we went in so many directions that I'd even expect, but it was brilliant and lovely to talk to you as always.
• 1:01:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: Thank you so much for taking the time.
• 1:01:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh my gosh, it is so much fun to talk to you.
• 1:01:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: I, I feel like my brain expands every time we speak.
• 1:01:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I had a lovely time and one day I will make you watch the anime fair and you will like it.
• 1:01:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's just about else.
• 1:01:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Come on.
• 1:01:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: We need, it will happen.
• 1:01:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: It has happened.
• 1:01:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
• 1:01:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to show.
• 1:01:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're going to hear about this every time I come on.
• 1:01:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: So remember.
• 1:01:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: And at some point, I will finally find the time to do it.
• 1:01:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then we'll have that discussion.
• 1:01:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Never at home, but I talked to you.
• 1:01:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: I know.
• 1:01:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: Finally, once I am, which is good.
• 1:01:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 1:01:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, yeah.
• 1:01:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then it'll be like a premium podcast where we discuss it.
• 1:01:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:02:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: Share it with me after math and tech won't say us, though.
• 1:02:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: I actually would love that.
• 1:02:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Look, make that happen.
• 1:02:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: We need to do that.
• 1:02:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: All right.
• 1:02:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for the conversation.
• 1:02:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
• 1:02:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: All right.
• 1:02:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: No problem.
• 1:02:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: Head a Jackson is a co-founder of Aquar Math.
• 1:02:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: Tecmon save us has made a partnership with the nation magazine at his host by me, Paris Marks.
• 1:02:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: Production is by Kyle Huesen.
• 1:02:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: Tecmon save us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry.
• 1:02:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash Tecmon save us, making a pleasure of your own.
• 1:02:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: Thanks for listening, and make sure to come back next week.