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Big Tech’s Bogus Vision for the Future w/ Paris Marx · Computer Says Maybe

• Sam Altman: [00:00:00] We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue. We have made a soft promise to investors that once we've built this sort of generally intelligent system, basically we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return for you. Alix: Hey there, welcome back. That friends with Sam Altman making our point for us. Alix: Um, that is the, uh. Perfect hair-brained, ridiculous claim that we get into in this episode. If you listen to computer, says maybe you probably listen to, tech Won't Save Us by Paris Marks, and that is who I get to sit down with this week. We talk about lots of things. We go in areas I wouldn't have expected, including. Alix: Did you know that Paris Marx was a fanboy for Apple back in the day? Paris: So I started writing about tech in like 20 15, 20 16, on like medium or whatever. And then over time, I started to write for leftist [00:01:00] publications and then bigger publications. From there. I had one foot in academia doing a bachelor's and a master's and all those sorts of things. Started the podcast in 2020 in lockdown. Paris: Uh, it was unclear what was happening and I said, ah, this seems like a great time to start a podcast. But yeah, and you know, now I, I kind of do the podcast. I talk to a lot of really interesting people about tech issues working on my second book. What is the Alix: timeline? Like, what's the goal for the book? And like, is there like an overall premise? Paris: Yeah, I'm supposed to have a draft written by November. We'll see if that's gonna happen or not. And then theoretically it would be out like about a year after that. So the fall of 26. But again, that depends on whether I get things done on time and whatnot. And yeah, the, the premise of the book is that we've had this massive expansion of hyperscale data centers in the past number of years. Paris: These tech companies said that this was necessary for the dreams that they had of the techno vision of the future that they want to achieve, but also, you know, particular business goals [00:02:00] that they have. Obviously we have been paying a lot more attention to that in the generative AI moment, but that doesn't mean that data centers and hyperscale data centers are just a product of generative ai. Paris: It's just that we have seen this expansion of the build out over the past few years, but that has come with concerns about supply chains and environmental implications. It has come with a number of community impacts as these data centers are built out, whether it's the water use, the energy use that comes along with it, what it means for the grid, and basically like the broader framing that I'm trying to bring to the book is this question of. Paris: Do we really need this much computation? If we were concerned about, you know, using technology to enhance social good, to actually serve the wider public rather than being in service of these visions and business models of these major tech companies? Alix: Road to Nowhere was your fir first and only so far book, is that right? Alix: That's right, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Um, 'cause that feels very, like, incredibly prescient in terms of thinking about both overall, how we think about [00:03:00] problems as they relate to technology. How we think about the people that we allow to articulate those high level social problems and how we might tackle them. And then the effects that that has on lots of different conversations and it continues to teach us things. Alix: I think to think about that frame of like, maybe we should second guess. A lot of these claims about technology, a lot of the presumptive way that tech people talk to us about the future. How are you thinking about how the data center discourse might change in the intervening 18 months when you're writing the book and publishing the book, given it feels like it's increasingly capturing the public consciousness that this issue of physical infrastructure of. Alix: AI systems and sort of the computational and energy demands we're putting on these systems. So like how do you think about the longer arc of this question? Does this feel like a helpful metaphor to tell us something about the next 10 years? And are you thinking about that past book in terms of the way this book might be useful Paris: in the next. Paris: Five years. Totally. You know, the work that I did on that book is always with me, right? Because it was a way of putting together my [00:04:00] perspective on the tech industry and how I develop that perspective to a certain degree. You know, I don't go into that specifically. I don't believe in the book itself, but it was like looking at transportation and these promises around transportation we're what we're really like a wake up call for me. Paris: To see what the tech industry was doing and to not really fall for like the boosterism and the hype in a way that I might have in the past. Right. You know, I was an Apple fanboy back in the day in the 2010s. I really believed that automation and AI and stuff were going to eliminate all these jobs and people were gonna be destitute. Paris: There was a period where I believed that and then there was like a, a moment of wake up in the latter half of the 2010s where I was like, on the one hand, all of these jobs weren't eliminated, but what we had was algorithmic management, the rise of the gig economy and all these other sorts of things that I feel like the discourse around automation kind of distracted us from. Paris: Then also all these notions that the tech companies were gonna solve, all these transport problems. And then actually when you looked a couple years down the line, you saw that very little of that was ever [00:05:00] delivered. But actually there were a lot of consequences of this development. And so now when I think about the data center question. Paris: I explicitly pitched the book as a data center book and not an AI book because I knew that the AI question was going to evolve. You know? Would the bubble burst? Would it keep going? It's hard to know for sure. AI will still be obviously a thread of the book, but data centers were an issue before ai, generative AI in particular, and we have just seen this expansion in the past number of years. Paris: And so right now in this moment, the question is like. What are we going to see in the short term? Is the acceleration going to continue on the scale that we have seen, or is that going to slow down? I don't think it's going to stop, right, because even before generative ai, we were still seeing a continual increase in the number of hyperscale data centers in particular that were being constructed by these major tech companies. Paris: There are some. Questions as to whether the amount of data centers these companies are going to build are as many as they were announcing. You know, in the past year or so, we have the growing questions about [00:06:00] Microsoft and Amazon and their data center contracts. MIT Tech Review did some great reporting on what's happening in China where it really seems that the data center boom has completely leveled off over there because of overbuilding and things like that. Paris: You know, I think that there are still questions about the usefulness of generative AI and whether it justifies all of this computation that is going into it. But on the flip side of that, the bigger picture is. If you look at the business models of these major tech companies, the companies that are driving this part of their business goals depend on continually increasing the amount of computation that we collectively use, right? Paris: If you think about cloud providers, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, they need to grow their cloud businesses, and that grows by getting us to use more computation, right? So there's an inherent incentive for them to try to increase that. And then on the other piece. I think an important piece of the conversation that maybe doesn't get brought in enough is that a lot of these people in the tech industry are kind of ideologically wedded to a vision of the future that [00:07:00] requires significantly more computation than what we have right now, and that drives their ideas of what the future of tech technology is going to be and where they should put their resources for the type of technology that they should develop, even if the generative AI boom starts to level off. Paris: I don't think the data center boom is inherently going to stop. Right. It might slow for a little bit, but these companies are incentivized to keep that expansion going. Alix: Yeah. I don't think that many people understand. How many of the people pushing generative AI make money when computation happens? Like totally. Alix: You and and I and I hear sometimes people make the case that it's in these company's interests to be more efficient. That would be true if they were buying computation from another company in order to serve a product, because it would essentially mean they would be incentivized to lower the cost of providing the product to a customer that's paying. Alix: But that's not at all how these economies work. I think it's hard also to explain that to someone who just sees Gemini on their phone and [00:08:00] is like, oh, Google's as usual, giving me something free now that eventually they'll charge me for once it's good enough or whatever. That like old logic and it doesn't really apply anymore. Paris: And I think the flip side of that is like. There's not the incentive there. In order to significantly make them more efficient, that will only come through competition from other companies. Right. You know, kind of making their models more efficient. And so the conversation after deep seek threw everything off at the end of last year, I believe it was, or beginning of this year, my month time. Paris: A circle. Yeah, I know, totally. But you know, basically after that happened, the discussion became okay. Even if we're making these models more efficient, even if the use of them and the training of them is not going to require as much computation as it did in the past, and I think it's still kind of up in the air, how much deep seeq actually made things more efficient in what they were doing. Paris: But even then, you saw the response of. Nvidia and Satya Nadella at Microsoft and you know, some of these other CEOs basically being like, even if things [00:09:00] become more efficient, that just means that Jevons paradox or whatever kicks in. And then that means that more people are going to use the product because it has become more efficient to deliver. Paris: And so the amount of computation that we're going to need is still going to increase. So the demand for Microsoft Azure Cloud services is not going anywhere. And the demand for. For Nvidia GPUs is not going anywhere, so we are still structurally fine with whatever direction it goes. If they stay inefficient, we're fine. Paris: If it gets more efficient, we're also fine. 'cause then theoretically more people are going to use it. I don't think they're very worried about this. Alix: No, I don't think they are. To me that. Makes it clearer that during this period it becomes even more important to increase the demands we make when they're going to build this infrastructure. Alix: 'cause whatever gets left behind is either gonna be more coal plants and nuclear plants coming online to power these things. Like it makes a difference to society what happens, even if it doesn't make a difference to their bottom line. And I feel like we haven't [00:10:00] quite clocked. That they may be in a win-win situation, but I don't think the public is, or anyone who isn't making money from stocks from their companies. Paris: It is startling though, the degree to which they really don't seem to care about the implications of what they're doing. Right. Because the tech industry for so long did want to present itself as like. Socially progressive, environmentally conscious, they were the better capitalism than all the other companies that we were relying on in the past. Paris: And now the generative ai moment arrives and it's just basically mask off. They are going to build as much infrastructure as they want. It doesn't matter how much power that is going to require because it's necessary for the grand future that they're building. You know, in some of the narratives that they talk about. Paris: You know, we saw Eric Schmidt in front of the Senate recently saying that energy. Needs are going to rise from 3% to 9% in a very short period of time. We have all these companies talking about nuclear and how nuclear is gonna be fantastic, but they don't want to [00:11:00] acknowledge that nuclear takes a lot of time to come online if it will come online in the way that they suggest as well. Paris: And in the meantime. Many of them are relying on fossil fuels, not just existing fossil fuels, but scaling up what is already there, bringing things that are offline, back online. And there was even reporting in Bloomberg, I believe it was earlier this year, that the amount of investment that is going into fossil fuel infrastructure in the United States is at a level that we haven't seen in years. Paris: I would not be surprised if that is being replicated in other parts of the world, as is this rush to like get in on this boom, because this is what the tech industry is excited about, so nobody can miss out on it, but it is just startling to see the degree to which all of these narratives of the past are out the window because they need to go for generative ai, they need to go for data center expansion, and we just all need to accept it and believe that this is how we're going to solve a ton of social problems. Paris: Again, that they often. Have never actually proven to be able to do in the past, but they love to promise it every single time there's a new [00:12:00] technology. And don't worry about the environmental implications of all this because when the AI is powerful enough, it will just solve it on its own. Like it's foolishness. Alix: Yeah. Physical reality means nothing. Yeah. I've been reading Apple in China. I don't know if you have you. I Paris: haven't. I haven't started reading it yet Alix: though. God, it's, if I was. A politician in the west, I don't even know what that means anymore. I would be so pissed. Um, 'cause it's essentially this. Mass subsidy of state development that these companies who benefit from, you know, the other types of infrastructure for their knowledge, work operations, it's, it's wild. Alix: And I feel like now watching them kind of scramble to be like, what might that look like here? It's trying to like literally proxy some of those things rather than say, wait a second. These companies now make so much money. How can we get some of that to not just fill our coffers or survive, but to actually [00:13:00] thrive and kind of have that contribute to, and not just economic growth, but like cultural growth and like infrastructure growth and all this stuff that China has benefited from This relationship with Apple, I would be so pissed, but then they're. Alix: Translating that into any type of leverage or creativity or imagination. It's just like, how can we get a little piece of that, which is kind of sad. Paris: It's so fascinating to me. Right? Because I think the narrative is completely correct. I haven't read the book, but I've watched a couple interviews with the author, so I'll say that. Paris: Right. I, I do intend to read the book, and this is something that he's acknowledged, at least in the interviews. I'm sure it's in the book as well, but it's like. Yeah, there is this issue with Apple basically subsidizing this mass kind of build out of the industrial base of China over the past number of decades. Paris: In part, that was also incentivized by the United States, right, and by US capitalists that wanted to like get away from unionized and more well-paid workforces. In the United States [00:14:00] wanted to move to like these cheaper locations. I believe Apple was actually one of the later ones to move over to China compared to some other companies that had done it. Paris: And so it's like now you're looking at what the Trump administration is doing and like these narratives, even in the Biden administration about bringing Mac chip production and all that kind of stuff. It's like, we need to bring this stuff back to America. We need to be producing more here. And it's fascinating because for the past few decades it's been like. Paris: We need to get this stuff out of the United States. We need to be doing it anywhere else. And not really worrying about like the broader consequences of doing that. Because America was like, on top of the world, had all the money was so powerful, and now that there's this growing kind of geopolitical tension and threat, it's like, oh, we can't build anything anymore. Paris: Oops. And and why is that? It's like, yeah, Chyna went over there, but it's like you've kind of like set the. You know, domestic and international framework to encourage them to do it. And that's not gonna be reversed overnight, you know? Alix: No, I mean, they're having like [00:15:00] 1980s conversations that should have happened then now. Alix: And it's like, guys, like the ship is sailed. Like, I don't know what to tell you. And like the level of commitment over. 30, 40 years of these outsourced manufacturing. Yeah, you can't flip a switch. But also it's kind of wild because all of these same people advocating for it now, for this all to be built in the US were arguing the exact opposite thing when it mattered. Alix: When that was like a vision that you could have instead of just cheaper goods for more people in the US to feel more special as consumers in the global economy. Paris: It's fascinating too, right? Because. Obviously to bring that production back to the United States, you would need like a really strong industrial policy in order to promote that shift. Paris: And it feels like in the United States, but also in Canada. In Europe, it's still like, okay, the government will come in and give a bit of money and try to help with some things, but it's still like we expect the private sector. To do this sort of a thing. [00:16:00] Whereas if you look at China, yeah, they benefited immensely from this push to outsource production to China in particular and, and other parts of the world. Paris: But a lot of that ended up going to China. But it was also the government had really effective industrial policy to promote and a vision. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You know the five year plans, like they, they work uh, to a certain degree, but it's like even. I watch electric cars really closely. You know, I wrote a whole book on transportation and I feel like the narrative that we have in North America is China created these public car companies and gave them a load of subsidies, and now they can just like undercut us all and they stole all these secrets from Western automakers and that's the only reason why they're good. Paris: Right. It's not fair, Alix: I think is the primary. Yeah. Paris: Totally. But then you look at like what actually happened there. And yeah, there were agreements between Chinese automakers and Western automakers because that was part of the agreement of like setting up car factories [00:17:00] in China, was that you needed to have these sorts of arrangements. Paris: And they obviously learned from that, from making all of these cars, just like they learned from making iPhones and making so many other consumer products and kind of built out this industrial base and this industrial knowledge. But it's not like. The government set up BYD and made this massive car company. Paris: The federal government, the national government in China, set this goal around electric vehicles and started working on it like a decade ago. And then that filtered down to like the provincial level where you had all these provincial governments competing to try to get their own electric vehicle industry because of the way that it's all set up. Paris: And so you had over a hundred electric vehicle companies across the country all competing. To get consumers to buy their vehicles and to like one up their competitors and all that. And now we're in the stage of consolidation where a number of those electric vehicle makers are going under and some of the other ones are winning and getting bigger, like BYD, Gilly, [00:18:00] those sorts of companies. Paris: But it's not like they just created a public company and gave it a bunch of subsidies and then it became this global phenomenon. It's like, no, they accelerated the. Competitive landscape that we would tend to see in the west basically, but made sure that the period of competition happened over a much shorter period of time so they could scale up and kind of like improve much more quickly. Paris: And that is a big part of the reason why Chinese electric vehicle companies are increasingly becoming so globally dominant and, and of course not just electric vehicles, but hybrids and internal combustion in parts of the global south in Europe as well. Alix: You're making me realize too that Western technology companies. Alix: The competition happens at the level of marketing. So like Tesla became the electric vehicle in the public imagination, but there wasn't actually infrastructure there for it to get better at producing these cars at scale over a longer period of time, because that's not where western [00:19:00] companies compete. Alix: They compete in the public imagination and market understanding, and I feel like most Americans think that there's really healthy competition. Which is also kind of sad 'cause setting, uh, the arena, I mean that's such an interesting model of saying having the state set a priority and then basically say we will try and make it as easy as possible for as many companies as possible to compete, to make the best car at the cheapest amount to serve consumers in China, I imagine first. Alix: And then once we do that, we can start thinking about exporting. Whereas I feel like Musk within like probably what like. Nine months of the first prototype of a Tesla car, there was a conception that there was a fully mature business behind it, but there's not, Paris: I feel like the model doesn't work in our countries as well. Paris: Right, because. In doing that, you also have to acknowledge that there's gonna be a load of waste and there is going to be the deployment of public subsidies to these companies that are gonna go bust within a few years. You know, you think in the United States you have the [00:20:00] example of how, like Cylindra became this big example of, you know, wasteful government spending and all this, you know, this kind of solar company post Obama who got some money in like his stimulus plans and stuff like that. Paris: It didn't matter of course, that. Tesla also got money from that same program and grew immensely and was an example of like positive government investment. But it's like if one thing fails, we treat it as, oh, the government doesn't know what it's doing. It is so wasteful and inefficient and all this kind of stuff. Paris: Whereas the Chinese government is like. Listen, we're gonna lose a bunch of money. There's gonna be companies that get started and, and go under, but this is all in service of this broader goal to like accelerate this industry. Right. And it's to the point now where China is not just dominant in electric vehicles, but also in solar panels and you know, in battery storage and in so many other of the technologies that are like. Paris: Proving to be key to the 21st century. Whether they're consumer technologies like AI and stuff as well, military [00:21:00] technologies, they're advancing in ship building and aviation. All of these things because they are just funneling money into building up the capacities because they see that this is like really important for their position in the world, basically. Paris: And I feel like in. North America in particular, but I would say the West more generally. It feels like we have just like forgotten what industrial policy looks like and how to do it effectively. There's also this concern about spending money and having it be wasteful and then like the political right can take advantage of it and say. Paris: The government can't do anything and the usual narratives that we're used to hearing, but if we are serious about kind of rebuilding our societies and bringing these kinds of capacities back on shore, then we're going to have to recognize that one. There's going to have to be an important government role in achieving that, but also that there's gonna be like. Paris: Spending that's required and some of that is gonna be wasted along the way because that's just like the game. That's how it works. Alix: I was reading an article this morning about the new NSF [00:22:00] budget and basically if it goes through that the funding for postdocs in the US will be cut by 91%, which like if you think about this failure to orient a national strategy around. Alix: Infrastructure for building things, so like the capital expenditure necessary to build the factories that are, you know, able to produce these cutting edge things. And then you think about the failure slash intentional self own goal of like cutting all science research basically. It's not looking good like I like. Alix: Then all you have is these like scam brands. Paris: It's fascinating to see what the United States is doing right now. Like obviously you hate to see it because there's so many people being affected by it, and I hate to see the tariff wars and stuff against Canada and so many other parts of the world. The United States is clearly concerned about its place in the world with a rising China. Paris: You know, it's not the global hegemon anymore, right? We're in a multipolar world where. Various countries have regional [00:23:00] influence in a way that was not so much the case in decades past when the United States was the dominant player basically anywhere around the world. Technologically it's being threatened, militarily, it's being threatened. Paris: You can see that the United States is insecure about its place, or at least the US government is insecure about what it expects the United States to be on the world stage. In response to that, we basically have the kind of make America great again sort of. Policy platform, right? Agenda. It's argued of course, that these policies are what are going to be necessary to like preserve American power, get all this production to come back on shore, all these sorts of things. Paris: But actually I feel like what we're seeing is more that this whole policy agenda is just accelerating this potential decline. Of the United States and giving so many other, you know, players around the world, the opportunity to continue to advance on the United States, the tariffs war is not going to lead to [00:24:00] what the United States hopes, especially like we were talking about, if it's not paired with this program to actually build up the capacities, which we're not really seeing. Paris: It's all stick and no carrot. But then the other piece of this is. Like you were saying with the NSF and all this science funding and NASA funding, it's like the United States is really gutting what is key to, and has been key to its technological and scientific advancement and superiority over the past century and that. Paris: On the one hand will be very difficult to build back up, but we're already seeing the consequences of just like the threat of it, right? Not even the carry through where so many academics and top scientists are already, there was a, a survey published in Nature recently are looking to move to Europe and Canada and other parts of the world if they haven't moved already, where they know that they'll still have stable funding. Paris: I've talked to people who suggest that. China is quite likely going to beat America back to the moon at this point because the American Moon [00:25:00] program is dependent on SpaceX Starship Rocket, which does not look like it's going to be ready on time in so many different areas. What the United States seems to want to do is not actually what's happening in practice, and it's just like continually shooting itself in the foot. Alix: It has a, this vision piece of basically to win the future. States have to have a vision that they orient around. That is the role. One role of government that I think the us, Canada, and probably some European countries have started to pretend like is the responsibility of the private sector. And I think it changes what happens because it creates this leadership vacuum essentially, that you can then fill with these very scammy dudes who are like, I can do that and I can do it better than. Alix: A government can, and I can also use media and brand and content essentially to cosplay as a leader of a country, even though I'm clearly not capable on multiple levels of, of doing that, and I don't have the political legitimacy to [00:26:00] be doing it, and I just find it really, the state has to retreat for this kind of way of working for these tech leaders to work. Alix: And I feel like those two things very much are in tandem with each other. Paris: Yeah, totally. This is, this has long been my argument about Silicon Valley and about Elon Musk in particular. And you know, when I say Silicon Valley, I mean like post-internet, Silicon Valley, let's put it that way. 'cause you know, this is, uh, an industry that has been around a lot longer than that. Paris: But basically you had the retreat of. The government and the private sector of providing any kind of vision to the public, you know, through the neoliberal period, right? Basically like after the nineties or so, they kind of stepped back from that and seeded the space of thinking about what a better future for Americans. Paris: You know, people in whatever country, you know, people around the world more generally, what that future was actually going to look like, and the tech industry was able to step into that void. And someone like Elon Musk, you know, as kind of the centerpiece of that and to say. [00:27:00] This is what our future is going to be. Paris: This is how we're going to achieve it. Everything is going to be so great and wonderful if you just allow us to do whatever we want, not be overly regulated, release our technologies and allow us to do so in the way that we want to, and we'll make a lot of money, but also there will be all these benefits that will come along with it. Paris: And the benefits kept not totally arriving. Like, you know, obviously there were a lot of benefits that came of the internet. More generally in some of these earlier digital technologies, but as we get to more of like the firmer business models in like the 2010s and even like later part of the two thousands, the consequences start to become clearer. Paris: But the narrative is still that this is the way that we make the world a better place. This is the way that we solve all these problems, whether it's with communication, whether it's with transportation, all this kind of stuff. So just trust us and we will. Deliver this grand wonderful future. We'll solve climate change will bring us to Mars, make us a multi-planetary species, all this kind of stuff.[00:28:00] Paris: And now I think we're kind of like in the period where these companies and the people who run them became immensely wealthy and powerful. All of the benefits that we were promised have largely not materialized. We are. Increasingly recognizing the harms and the drawbacks that have come of their business models. Paris: And that is part of the reason why over the past five to eight years, there has been this increase in regulation and antitrust investigation and trying to hold these people accountable for their actions, and that motivates this embrace of the political right. This broader right-wing program to protect themselves, right, to protect the vision that they presented of the future. Paris: But more than anything, to make sure that they're not going to be taxed, they're not going to see their companies overly regulated. They're not going to end up in prison as some founders, you know, have already found themselves. In already, and I would argue many more should. I kind of joked when Donald Trump announced he was reopening Alcatraz. Paris: I said, oh, great. It's a new prison for all the tech [00:29:00] founders to be put in when they're held accountable for their actions. I don't think that's likely to happen unfortunately, but yeah, twenties would Alix: probably be still alive to produce that problem. Paris: But you know, that's kind of like the trajectory that, that I see with them. Paris: Right. Alix: So how does this connect to, because I know you've done some work on conceptualizing sovereignty and kind of the, the way that we think about, given technology, you make a product, it's then immediately global, which means that a lot of the, you know, these small number of American companies have kind of pushed aside both the need to, and sometimes in some cases, the capacity to build. Alix: Technology that can be run at a national level or be at least in control of more values aligned, more democratically aligned institutional stuff. What do you think comes next in terms of these tech sovereignty conversations? Or like what do you wanna see when it comes to sovereignty issues? Paris: Yeah, I, I think it's a difficult conversation because obviously sovereignty is not a neutral concept. Paris: It's one that's very much associated with the state, and I think that people have very. Justified concerns about having the [00:30:00] state be more involved in the process of shaping and developing technology. Of course, the state has always been there. You know, the reason that Silicon Valley exists as it does, the reason that the modern tech industry exists, as it does, is because of government funding, of public funding of state programs in order to promote research and science and technology and all these sorts of things, right? Paris: So. That part of it shouldn't be forgotten. But I also think that we need to recognize that these companies are so powerful that if there is going to be any effective pushback to the power that they have, that needs to come from a government level. Yes, those governments need to be pushed. You know, that power needs to be developed in unions and local organizations and all these sorts of things to try to push these changes to happen. Paris: But there's no kind of. Counterforce that is going to be able to push back against the tech companies that isn't founding government is my view. So for me, my focus, especially since Trump's election has been less on what's happening in the United States, though I've been paying attention to that and obviously very concerned [00:31:00] about it, but more what can governments outside the United States do to start trying to reign in the power that the tech industry has been able to develop. Alix: I've been thinking a little bit about like. In the last 15 years, the kind of top down state projects that have attempted to digitize countries. So thinking about Adhar and India Stack and like, it feels like there's two discourses that are kind of running into each other in a way that I feel like might not be good, which is tech sovereignty's important and it's important to basically reduce the leverage that American companies and by extension the American government has on countries around the world. Alix: But then there's this other piece of like, let's digitize. Every resident in our country for the purpose of, fill in the blank of what any government might wanna do. And those feel like they're happening at the same time. And I think in some ways it's coincidental. But what do you think about the kind of digital public infrastructure discourse and the tech sovereignty get away from American company discourse and how [00:32:00] do they. Alix: Relate to each other. I dunno if you have thoughts on that one. Paris: I'm very concerned about it. Obviously, I'm no fan of what we've seen roll out in India, and there are many other countries as well that you know, are not as concerning as India, where we have still seen this movement toward trying to digitize as much as possible, kind of roll out these digital technologies into public space in a way that I think we would generally not be comfortable with. Paris: Even when you look at, say what again, the UK and Canada are proposing, it's like. We want to roll out AI in more places. We want to have more government departments using more AI to make things more efficient. I would like to know whether they're really thinking about the consequences that we have already seen of those efforts to deploy those technologies in service delivery and all those sorts of things, or whether we're going to just keep repeating the problems that come of that, right. Paris: I feel like. A lot of the discussion about digital sovereignty is coming from outside of government to a certain degree. You know, trying to pressure government, especially governments outside the United States to do more [00:33:00] in order to carve back, you know, this power that has effectively been seeded to US tech companies and the US government more broadly. Paris: I would argue over how technology works in our societies. The place where we have seen it taken up most unfortunately, I would argue so far, is in. Defense, right. Positioning this as a national security thing where we need to be building up particular capacities because, you know, the US military, the us, you know, the Pentagon, all this kind of stuff is not a reliable ally militarily in the way that it was in the past. Paris: And now Europe is looking at a major. MENT program Canada is ramping up defense spending along with that has come with putting climate commitments on the back burner, which I think is associated with this broader push for AI and data centers and all this kind of stuff. But yeah, I would say. I think that there are concerns with the direction that these discussions are going. Paris: I don't think that that is a reason not to keep trying to push to claw back this power to kind of build more [00:34:00] digital sovereignty, but I think it's a reflection of broader issues within government that we were talking about where vision has largely gone out the window. The idea that capacity is even there to do some of these things can be difficult too. Paris: Remind people or even try to think about how it can be rebuilt. Of course, along with the internet was this whole idea that digital technology should be left to the private sector and reversing that, I think is going to be a bit of an uphill climb. Maybe the final thing I would say is that the way I think about this is that, you know, we would have. Paris: To a certain degree, the public sector developing technology. But I think that one, we would wanna see investment in open source projects, nonprofit projects that are trying to develop things in communities, but also I would argue the creation of like public institutions that are separate from government, that are funded with a particular mandate to build technology to serve the wider public. Paris: So you don't have that kind of constant government interference in the way that we would typically have with [00:35:00] like a public broadcaster. Right. You know, they are a public. Corporation, but you don't have in Europe or Canada or Australia or anything, you don't have the government like interfering and saying, you need to report on this. Paris: You can't report on that. It's not state media in the way that, you know, we think of some things. Um, it's just a public media organization that is not so focused on turning a profit, but has a different mandate in order to serve the public. And I would say, how can we think about setting up. A public technology development system that receives funds that is well financed to do its work, but is not focused on creating a unicorn or privatizing some technology or increasing shareholder value and what investors are going to make. Paris: But how can these things actually be deployed to materially improve people's lives? And I think the type of technology that would come from a mandate like that would look a lot different from what we see from Silicon Valley and this private tech industry. Alix: Yeah, that's super interesting. I think it's a really good point about appropriately resourcing [00:36:00] public institutions that are not state controlled. Alix: It's a reminder, I hear a lot of understanding public ownership of something, a protocol of whatever with technology as not necessarily meaning state owned, but can also mean community owned. And being more creative about how we think about, um, alternative models of ownership and governance, I think is really important here. Alix: And it's not just, is it like. Musk or France, it's like there's a lot of other options here and we should be thinking much more creatively Paris: and like, I think that there's a lot of opportunity in in there to think about like, you know, interoperability and federation. Because if you're thinking about like, okay, we want more leverage or power. Paris: At the national level, or even at the community level to think about the way that we use these technologies. But you know, we're used to engaging with this broader global network. We don't wanna lose that piece of it. So we don't want like one Facebook to control this whole thing, but instead we can think about federation, we can think about interoperability, have [00:37:00] maybe national platforms that are set up or apps or services or whatever to access all of this kind of. Paris: Content that is happening globally. It can give you a local experience, but then you can connect into this broader global network as well. And maybe there are different rules around moderation in different countries or whatever people decide. But then even then, like if you have the national platform that maybe people would be incentivized to use, people could still set up alternative ways to kind of tap into this broader network. Paris: And because you would have multiple countries coming together to. Finance this to try to build this up. Then I think you would think about, okay, maybe there's like a Canada app and maybe there's a France app and a UK app and a Brazil app. That's all kind of tapped into this shared collaborative network. Paris: But also, if you don't want to use the Canada app, you can use the app that, I don't know, some small team made that has features that you prefer or an interface that you like more. I think that there are a lot of different ways to thinking about how this could potentially work. I'm not saying I have all the answers.[00:38:00] Paris: But I think that that is where there's kind of like excitement and opportunity as well in trying something different and trying to break the, the kind of monopoly that Silicon Valley has. Not just on these technologies, but also how we think about them and how they could work. Alix: Yeah, and I think. What I'm hearing is choice, competition, pluralism, and then you saying you don't necessarily have all the answers. Alix: That's like kind of the belief is like moving beyond one dude being like, this is how it'll be. Um, which I feel like is kind of where we are now, and it has left us in a situation that is not great. What do you make of all the app proto stuff and decentralized possibilities in blue sky, et cetera, et cetera, how are you feeling about that? Paris: Yeah, I think it's interesting. I think I'm still watching to see where it all goes. One concern I have with the Blue Sky folks is obviously it's, you know, a private company, so it has particular incentives that come with that. Um, so you know what is going to happen at the end of the day. Are there opportunities to also look at the fetty versus something that could be expanded or used in a different way [00:39:00] or make it easier for more people to get involved in? Paris: That is obviously something to think about. I think Blue Sky has been a really interesting like. Experiment. It's been cool to see how much it has grown over the past, you know, year or so. I think that there are also still questions about its future, right? There's not a clear business model there. Paris: Obviously the people who run it are talking about subscriptions, but have also started to talk about advertising after previously saying that they weren't going to do ads. So, you know, hopefully they do it, you know, very thoughtfully and conscientiously. I'll be watching the space, let's, let's put it that way. Alix: Thank you. This was great. This was exactly the kind of conversation I wanted to have. Yeah, I Paris: know we kind of veered and, but it's so nice to be able to talk Alix: across all these themes 'cause I feel like very few people I think are thinking across them in the way you are. And it's really nice to have an unfettered, exploratory conversation on this stuff 'cause it all ties together, but it's so big and complicated and I think it can be hard to. Alix: Feel free.[00:40:00] Alix: Okay. I hope that was interesting to you and that it was fun to hear. Hopefully two podcast voices that you listen to regularly. I actually talked to each other. I had a blast. I've wanted to have a wide ranging conversation with Paris Marks for a long time, and I'm really glad we took the time to do it. Alix: And I learned a lot about the electric. Car manufacturing industry in China, which I wasn't really expecting, but that's actually one of my favorite things about hosting the show is talking to experts and going in places. I wouldn't have thought we would've ended up. Thanks to Georgia Iacovou and Sarah Myles for producing this episode, and next week we are going to have our first interview in a series of conversations about decentralization. Alix: Don't worry, we're not going down some sociopathic libertarian path. We are interviewing people who are trying to make stuff, which I feel like I really enjoy talking to. Values aligned people who are actually trying to create something new that we can engage with. And as a baby, Hanni says critique is service, but so is building. Alix: I hope you enjoy these conversations. A decentralization. It's such a complex [00:41:00] topic. We thought it was best to talk to a couple of different people looking at it from a different vantage point, and that's what we're gonna do. Alix: So with that, thanks for joining.