00:00:55.200Rio was actually one of the first people I talked with about More Everything Forever back when I was first considering writing it.
00:01:02.500And they helped me think through some of the big ideas in the book.
00:01:06.680But they also gave me a really important piece of the end of the book.
00:01:10.060Rio pointed out to me that the people I was writing about, their ideas about the future aren't just impossible but also really narrow.
00:01:18.960Because in reality, the future is open.
00:01:21.600Of course, the tech oligarchs don't want us to see the future as open because controlling our idea of the future controls what futures are allowed to happen.
00:01:32.200Breaking out of that dynamic is what this show is about, and it's a lot of what Rio and I talked about this week.
00:02:18.400I know you best, I think, from your podcast about the future.
00:02:25.260I mean, when I started working on More Everything Forever and I realized what I was writing a book about, I realized, wait, no, I got to go get lunch with Rio.
00:09:59.140Yeah, exactly. Like I hadn't I hadn't really thought about that. I mean, you know, I thought about encyclopedias and stuff like that. But this also is sort of strangely giving me a kind of hope because it's telling me that things like fake news and political conspiracy theories and memes that have no basis in reality are old.
00:10:23.160I think a lot today about zines, right? And the sort of resurgence of zine culture right now, which is super exciting to me. And the sort of value in distributing and printing your own kind of way of thinking about the future. And, you know, we're both in Oakland. There's just incredible zine culture here in Oakland. And I have this collection of radical zines now.
00:10:43.800And when I look at these radical almanacs, it's all I can think about is like people saying, no, no, no, there's other ways of thinking about this.
00:10:51.000There's other things that are possible.
00:10:52.080And you'd pass them around and you hand them to your friends and you share them.
00:10:55.380Right. And there's this kind of real accessibility to them.
00:10:59.060Almanacs are really interesting because they're really hard to study because people didn't save them.
00:11:02.480Right. They were just they were used by people for kindling.
00:11:05.740Once the year is over, they're not a functional object anymore.
00:11:09.940Exactly. And so there's this really interesting gap, I think, in a lot of the historical research around this because it's seen as kind of this lowbrow object. It's mostly for people who aren't very educated and they don't get saved. And so there's like not actually that much research on especially these radical almanacs because a lot of them were destroyed. And so I'm super interested in that and the parallels to like zine culture today.
00:11:31.100The zine culture thing is very interesting to me because one of the promises of the internet that was around when you and I were kids or very young adults was this is going to be the great equalizer.
00:11:45.720This is going to make it possible for anyone to publish a magazine, anyone to get the word out about anything that they care about, and this will inevitably make the world a better place.
00:11:57.400On the one hand, we have seen that that is not true in that that's not how the internet works. On the other hand, you could also argue that in some ways the internet never met that early promise in the first place because of the centralization of so many parts of the internet onto giant corporate platforms.
00:12:43.540And it's very hard to hold them accountable to do so.
00:12:45.660And yet they keep selling that vision of the future. Right. They keep saying this is a liberatory technology. I mean, I remember people saying like, oh, you know, social media is clearly going to be a force for social good. Look at the Arab Spring. Right. And it's clearly not what happened.
00:13:05.400But there is still this notion that I think is very powerful that these, well, two related ideas, I guess, are coming to mind.
00:13:15.260first that these things are inherently liberatory in some way when they're not, but also this idea
00:13:22.920that there's something inevitable about them, that social media has to exist, that these platforms
00:13:29.080have to exist rather than being things that were made by people who made choices about what was
00:13:35.320going to exist. Yeah. I mean, I think that just going back to this sort of bigger question that
00:13:39.920I'm really interested in, which is how do we decide and give the power of the futurist sort
00:13:45.620of title to people throughout time? And what you see, and sort of to your earlier point that we
00:13:51.400actually don't really change and we don't, it's all sort of the same loop over and over again,
00:13:55.460is that one of the arguments that the people who hold this title make is that their version of the
00:14:02.040future is inevitable. And you see this all the time. You see this in religious eschatology,
00:14:06.120Right. This end of the world sort of stuff. You see this even in the almanacs. Right. It's in the almanac. It's got to be true. You see this in divination techniques. You see this even in early, you know, the birth of economics as a kind of field and domain. Right. They're saying, well, it's just math. This is just what will happen because line go up. Right.
00:14:23.200I think there's this really interesting repeated theme of inevitability that allows for the people who hold those positions to lull the masses into accepting their version of the future. And I think that then, of course, at many stages, there are moments where people realize that that's not true. Right. And they pull away or they break away. And sometimes that breaking is violent and terrible. And sometimes it's not right. You know, there's that piece of it. But the inevitability piece is sort of core to the argument.
00:14:52.160And one of the things I think I'm really interested in is, you know, rather than as I've traced through this sort of history, rather than simply replacing the last futurist with the next one using that same argument, this person has magical powers about the future.
00:15:08.000Their version of the future is inevitable.
00:15:09.780If you follow them, you will make money.
00:15:11.300If you don't follow them, you'll be punished.
00:15:15.800How do we interrupt that logic as opposed to just appoint somebody new into that same loop?
00:15:21.280This is not surprising that this is where I'm taking this, but I just keep thinking about the venture capital hype cycle and how it does this, you know, at high speed, right?
00:15:33.660You know, the blockchain was inevitable.
00:15:35.940Everything was going to be on the blockchain.
00:15:46.620And we don't even bother replacing, you know, the guys.
00:15:50.280And they are almost all guys. Right. It's the same guys promoting the same stuff, both, you know, within the corporate ecosystem and the media media ecosystem that supports them.
00:16:02.220So I mean, don't you think, though, that do you feel is as you look around that there is now more of a resistance to A.I. and this I like it doesn't it is it's like being worn away each cycle.
00:16:13.140It feels. Do you feel that way or are you seeing that as well?
00:16:15.560I feel that way, but I also think that the AI hype has gotten much more traction to begin with than the crypto hype did, for example. Not every hype cycle is going to gain as much share of the public imagination as AI has, right? And I think that there are reasons for that, right?
00:16:36.060Some of it is certain ideas about the future that it slotted in well with that were already out there in the world thanks to science fiction.
00:16:47.660And some of it had to do with particular narratives about the future, like the singularity that have great currency within the tech ecosystem.
00:16:56.320Very real. Definitely going to happen.
00:16:58.180Oh, yeah, yeah. The singularity is near or nearer, depending on who you ask.
00:17:03.160Yes, right around the corner. It's coming any day now.
00:17:06.060I think that you're right. You know, I see, I see a lot of pushback, but I also think that part of the reason that we have that extra pushback is that the AI stuff is louder. And so it's generating more pushback.
00:17:19.880And I think that's good, right? I'm glad that that's happening, that we're getting the pushback. But I don't love, well, I don't, you know, I hate the inevitability stuff around it. You know, people say, well, AI is coming, so we're just going to have to adapt, you know, get on board. It's exactly what you were saying.
00:17:38.580Right. Yeah. I mean, you see this over and over again. Right. Like, I mean, the thing I always come back to is sort of religious eschatology. Right. This idea that the end of the world is coming at any given time. And this is sort of the singularity piece of it. But sort of this idea that, well, it doesn't really matter what you or I do because there's this sort of greater power of progress. Right. Or, you know, whatever God that they are sort of praying to in this moment.
00:18:01.380or perhaps they believe themselves to be gods, which I think is often the case as sort of is,
00:18:06.560I think, illustrated in your book, your last book. And so, right, like there's this thing of
00:18:12.940like, how dare you even question? You see the manifesto, right? The techno-futurist manifesto
00:18:19.140that's put out that sort of is, it was one of those moments where I've been working on this
00:18:23.440book proposal for a while now, on and off. And when Marc Andreessen published this techno-manifesto,
00:18:30.620I literally you know that tweet that's like I've been working on this for years and he just tweeted
00:18:34.620it out yes yes no I had basically I had the same experience I was actually I was in edits on my
00:18:42.480book you know like you know early edits you know I had a bad draft and I was trying to make it a
00:18:47.140less bad draft and that you know chapter where I talk so much about Andreessen I had been working
00:18:53.080on it and I was thinking about you know okay how do I really illustrate what's going on and like a
00:18:58.620day or two after i started working on edits on that chapter in particular this thing drops and
00:19:02.280i looked at it like oh gross this is perfect yeah right you're like well there you go you just you
00:19:09.040just he just tweeted it out yeah like tweeted it out yeah it's funny because a couple years ago i
00:19:13.560wrote a piece for wired about the sort of ties between the italian futurist movement and the
00:19:18.180modern futurists right yeah and the main tie is fascism right that's that's the main thing
00:19:22.300and people were like oh you're being so melodramatic this and that and then he puts out
00:19:27.080a manifesto that is very clearly modeled on exactly that,
00:19:30.240and in fact cites the Italian Futurist Manifesto.
00:19:33.400And I was like, the whole time I was right.
00:19:36.140So hold on, we got to talk about the Italian Futurist Manifesto.
00:19:45.880I mean, I can tell you what I know off the top of my head,
00:19:50.060and then you, I think, probably know more about them.
00:19:53.000What I know is that Marinetti was this artist in Italy in the very early 20th century who got very enamored of technology and really liked how fast cars could go.
00:20:11.740He liked fast cars, but that meant something very different in like 1905 than it does now.
00:20:19.460You know, I think I think he even got into like a car crash or something and thought that this was the most, you know, amazing, dramatic, romantic thing that could happen.
00:20:29.040And this inspired him to write this futurist manifesto that is all kinds of weird and proto-fascist.
00:20:40.320And in fact, Marinetti later went on to co-author the Fascist Manifesto about 10, 15 years later.
00:20:47.060And is also really violent and sexist in surprising ways.
00:26:48.380So yeah, I think that there is this really interesting parallel. And again, like, you
00:26:51.980know, we see it, we don't change that much, unfortunately, or fortunately. I think there
00:26:56.400are good things, too, about the ways in which humans can be resilient and sort of repeat
00:26:59.700if we need to. I can't remember if it was Lewandowski or who who said, like, oh, I don't
00:27:04.640read books. I think it's a waste of time to read books.
00:27:06.940Oh, yeah, no, that was actually Sam Bankman Freed.
00:27:09.280Okay, okay. I think they both may have said that at some point. But it is a common, I think, a common, right, this idea that, like, why would I need to learn history?
00:27:16.600Yeah, Elevenowski definitely said the thing about, like, why do I need to read history?
00:29:04.060So, yeah, I think I think we're allowed to find certain things aesthetically pleasing as long as we are also like, OK, yeah, but that doesn't mean that we think that that's good.
00:29:15.760Right. And anytime I see an artist today being like, I'm like a modern futurist and I'm like, maybe don't call yourself that.
00:29:24.040Well, so that's a question. I mean, how did the term futurist go from meaning this movement to meaning, you know, someone like Alvin Toffler, the guy who wrote Future Shock, and then now, you know, someone like, I don't know, Ray Kurzweil, the singularity dude.
00:29:41.300Yeah, I mean, it's sort of interesting. There's this moment in the 1930s where this idea of being able to predict social trends starts to really bubble up.
00:29:54.980President Herbert Hoover commissions a report on social trends from these people who kind of are emerging as this field of sort of economists and sort of sociologists and anthropologists who are kind of all interested in, you know, rather than looking back, looking forward.
00:30:09.540Right. And he commissions this giant report. I think it's like fifteen hundred pages that covers a million things.
00:30:15.820It's actually fun to kind of poke around in. It's one of those documents where you can just like bop around and see.
00:30:20.520I mean, it also has a ton of racism in it because it was published in 1933.
00:30:23.620So there's also that. But it sort of starts to talk about, OK, actually, trends in women's fashion.
00:30:29.180Right. It used to be that in on, you know, the sort of high fashion streets in New York, you would see a look and it would be there for the whole season.
00:30:37.220And now everything's moved. They're sort of already starting to think about like trend forecasting and this is moving around.
00:30:43.060Devin Powers has a great book called On Trend that is super interesting about all this stuff.
00:30:47.180And so you have that for a bit. And then in like the I think it's late 50s, early 60s, you start to get these consulting institutes, right?
00:30:53.540The Hudson Institute. You get this idea.
00:30:57.300And that's where the kind of idea of futurist or the capital F really starts to come into the fore.
00:31:02.000You have people who are saying, oh, you can hire me and I can help your business kind of understand what's coming, how to think about it.
00:31:10.380And that kind of starts to move further and further.
00:31:13.920There's a woman named Faith Popcorn who really kind of solidifies trend forecasting.
00:31:27.620She used to be an ad executive and worked on a ton of really iconic ad campaigns in the 80s, 70s, 80s, and then sort of spun off and created her sort of futurist group.
00:31:39.280But yeah, so you start to have in like the 80s, start to see this idea of futurism with a capital F in the way that we are thinking about it.
00:31:46.780And it's kind of this blend of marketing, trend forecasting, technology, this idea that you'd be a floater and a consultant, right? The consultant class kind of emerges in this like sort of around the 50s. And that all kind of comes together into this sort of weird moment where we get futurists that we think of today as these kind of like sci-fi technology, you know, stuff.
00:32:11.600And then, of course, today, there's sort of an interesting, I think there's a lot to be said about today's futurists and sort of the ways in which some of them are just business consultants.
00:32:19.020Some of them are science fiction writers.
00:32:20.800Some of them are doing some weird third thing that doesn't really make a lot of sense and sort of like how that industry operates.
00:32:28.100You can now get a degree, right, in foresight.
00:32:30.420That is a thing you can get a master's degree in.
00:32:33.960And some of those people do good work and are genuinely interested in how do we read signals?
00:32:42.540And some of them are just trying to subsidize their science fiction writing careers by taking money from giant corporations, which is also totally fair.
00:33:02.200So here's a message from the show's sponsors.
00:33:04.580i want to there's there's a question that i have never gotten a good answer to and i'm not i don't
00:33:15.240know that i'm gonna have one yeah i don't i don't know that you will but we're gonna talk about it
00:33:18.500um i'm noticing that like the rise of the sort of professional futurist it coincides with
00:33:26.200the creation of this idea about the future in the golden age of science fiction in the u.s
00:33:33.900that has been incredibly durable culturally right this idea that the future has to be in space
00:33:41.520that it's going to involve rocket ships and robots that there's going to be space colonization and
00:33:47.040it's going to you know that that that that is the future that there's flying cars and jet packs
00:33:54.240and that this is the future we were quote-unquote promised right that that peter teal line we were
00:34:00.400promised flying cars. Instead, we got 140 characters. And I think that Peter Thiel is a
00:34:06.440monster, but I understand what he's pointing at when he says that. And I think it's striking
00:34:11.980that, you know, 75-ish years on, we still have this very, we have this idea of what the future
00:34:21.760is that sort of in the cultural psyche, at least in this country, that would have been very
00:34:27.720comfortable on the front page of like astounding magazine in 1955 and your question is why yeah
00:34:35.120I think that it's a couple of things I think that that vision of the future rises because
00:34:42.720it is inherently linked to changes in the way that and the types of goods that are manufactured
00:34:49.780right you have glass glass being cheap and affordable and like everything made of glass
00:34:55.440You have World's Fair saying we have these homes of the future that's full of glass and plastic. Those are the two materials that are really important. How do we use those materials? And so I think you're seeing this sort of interplay between consumerism and this idea of progress as being something that should be attainable to a person and material related, glass, plastic, moldable objects, things you can mass produce.
00:35:19.780Right. You have Henry Ford. You have, you know, the Chicago World's Fair where you have the Kitchen of the Future.
00:35:25.940Right. You have Design for Dreaming, which is this it's a musical about cars and the future of cars.
00:35:32.140And so I think there's this, you know, idea that I think that futurisms in that moment are so tied to what we are suddenly learning how to make and manufacture in the United States.
00:35:43.920And I think this is a very U.S. centric form of the future. Right. That is very bounded to the United States.0.63
00:35:48.720when you look at other cultures, their forms of futurism are very different and don't involve a
00:35:53.480lot of that same stuff. But in the U.S., you have that sort of link between manufacturing,
00:35:59.480consumerism, and science fiction, even as science fiction authors are trying to sort of pretend like
00:36:03.940they are separate from those things. And I think that part of the reason why we still see that
00:36:10.420preserving is because science fiction hasn't given us something more compelling. And I love
00:36:16.160science fiction i think science fiction is great i read a lot of it yeah same the reason that i
00:36:20.420think we haven't seen a replacement is because to the folks who control manufacturing in the
00:36:25.480united states there isn't a more compelling sci-fi future right they the people who are making rockets
00:36:31.000the people who are making the stuff that controls the platforms that controls all of the manufacturing
00:36:36.320that controls politics right in the u.s like we've talked about the reason why the internet kind of0.94
00:36:41.260sucks, right? The sort of consolidation to these companies, they need consumers to buy certain
00:36:46.280kinds of things and to think certain kinds of things. And the kind of futures that help support
00:36:51.480that are the ones that are all about going to space and all about these sort of material things
00:36:55.980that they manufacture. Surprise. Now, of course, they're not delivering on that, right? They're
00:36:59.780not delivering on flying cars. They're not delivering on some of this other stuff. But
00:37:02.920there's enough of a link, I think, between those two things that you see it just entrenched in
00:37:08.200the sort of hyper-capitalist, mega-corporation people, and that's the stuff they're most
00:37:14.040interested in. I mean, when you hear these guys talk about what their favorite sci-fi is, it's all
00:37:17.940those kinds of things, because that's the work that they can imagine themselves doing and the
00:37:22.980material they know how to work with. This is a fascinating answer. I love this, because it's
00:37:27.680also such a good way of thinking about their misreading of that science fiction and the few
00:37:33.860elements of more recent science fiction that they're willing to pull in, right? There's this
00:37:38.500recording of Peter Thiel from about 15 years ago where he says that you should use mid-20th century
00:37:45.060science fiction as a blueprint for what you want to do in the future. And then he says that blueprint
00:37:49.220is develop the oceans, develop the deserts, develop space. And like develop here is clearly a
00:37:54.980euphemism for exploit. But also in that context, develop the deserts, that sounds like he's just
00:38:00.880completely misunderstanding what dune is about like yeah i don't i mean it doesn't go great
00:38:06.260let's say no no no it doesn't like i just and maybe he's there for the incest who knows there's
00:38:13.440a lot of that in dune i don't know man i don't know what he's into i mean honestly there's a
00:38:17.500lot of that in mid 20th century science fiction full stop right heineland's also into that and
00:38:21.740like and the the further the further right stuff has more of it i don't know what that's about
00:38:27.300Yeah, magical sex, witches, and incest is, like, a lot of doing.
00:38:41.580Musk said that, and he said that it was a book that was about, you know, figuring out the meaning of the universe, which is the question, or something like that.
00:38:51.380basically taking this giant joke from the book and thinking that it's a real profound philosophical
00:38:57.200insight that he alone understands. There's a wonderful review of Isaacson's Musk biography
00:39:08.520that Jill Lepore wrote in The New Yorker that is just a lovely takedown of Musk's ideas about
00:39:15.300science fiction and she points out that douglas adams like in the 70s and 80s was famously writing
00:39:23.000on a typewriter with a uh with a bumper sticker on the side that said end apartheid and obviously
00:39:28.700you know uh giant tech billionaires like musk are some of the main targets of the satire that adams
00:39:35.440is i was like i mean like zephard is so close like it's not even like it's truly it's tough
00:39:44.160As soon as I heard that, I was like, you know that you are in this book, but not in a good way.
00:39:50.400Yeah. Oh, come on. But Seifat's just this guy, you know?
00:41:26.540And so there's this thing of people sort of, and I don't know what if, whether it's media literacy or whether it's like Stan culture where you're either a fan or a hater and there's no sort of in between and sort of inability to kind of, I don't know.
00:41:37.420i i had to like close my computer the other day because someone on tumblr was really mad that0.98
00:41:40.720brokeback mountain didn't have a happy ending because like queer people deserve a happy ending0.86
00:41:43.880and i was like what i have to just walk away for i have to go to the grass like i can't handle this0.99
00:41:48.600right now but it was just this feeling of like there's i do think that there is a real lack of
00:41:53.220ability to critically think about some of the media that people are consuming um which is you
00:41:57.120know i don't think that that is the reason that these terrible men are doing i think they have
00:42:01.000other problems that they, uh, personality traits and issues. Um, but it is something I'm really
00:42:07.660interested in when I think about dystopian fiction or fiction around getting at some of these hard
00:42:14.560questions and warnings and trying to talk about, okay, what would it be like if we did this, if we
00:42:19.900really went down this road? And if people kind of can't grapple with a complicated message where
00:42:26.880no one's a hero, maybe, or it is more complicated. I think that's tough, right? It's like makes it
00:42:33.080hard to really talk about the future and really talk about what do you do with these complex
00:42:36.800people who are making decisions in the moment that might not be the right ones. And how do we
00:42:42.040come back from that? Right. Like, what does repair look like? How do we handle that? I mean,
00:42:45.420Octavia Butler is so good at addressing those questions, but all of her characters are super
00:42:50.540complicated, right? There is a lot of nuance there. And I don't know. It's hard for me sometimes
00:42:56.560to imagine, I mean, setting aside, you know, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel at all, like there's no
00:43:01.940amount of science fiction that will fix them. But when we think about like regular people who are
00:43:07.780sort of making choices in the world about how to engage and how to respond to the things that those
00:43:11.160men are doing and saying, I am really interested in how do we teach people to be better and more
00:43:18.560thoughtful consumers of some of these stories? Well, so this brings me back to something that
00:43:23.580you were talking about earlier and maybe this is a good place to sort of close things out
00:43:27.080you were saying that you're interested in the people who call themselves futurists but also
00:43:33.380how do we break out of the cycle of you know just anointing someone else as a futurist and
00:43:38.780instead finding a better way forward to think about what the future is um how do we do that
00:43:44.500how do we solve all the world's problems i know that's a million dollar question um yeah i mean
00:43:48.760I think this is the, this is the tough thing, right? Cause like, you know, this requires
00:43:52.540breaking millennia of human behavior, right? And I don't think that we're doing that. I'm not,
00:43:57.600you know, but I do think that the, this is going to sound really cheesy, but I actually genuinely
00:44:02.460believe that the first part of doing this is even recognizing that it's happening, right?
00:44:08.540Naming the system, naming the thing and saying, Hey, we keep falling into this cycle.
00:44:13.240Are we doing that right now? You know, what, what does that look like? Um, I think this is why I'm
00:44:18.240really hesitant to just sort of reappoint, like, oh, put all women in charge or, oh, like, we'll0.97
00:44:21.940just like do X. And it's like, well, women can do crimes, too, you know, actually. And so exactly.0.88
00:44:29.900Yeah. Girl, boss, gatekeep, lean in. And so, yeah. So I just think that like being able to1.00
00:44:35.380think about where is this coming from? What do I actually want? I think that there are a lot of
00:44:40.600really beautiful models for collective decision making, collective memory that exist all over
00:44:46.020the world um often in indigenous cultures right around how do we share decision making how do we
00:44:51.120share memory how do we think about what expertise looks like that isn't just a phd or isn't just
00:44:57.000having a shitload of money um and you know i don't want to suggest that some people don't
00:45:03.600have expertise right there's a certain version of this that if you go too far down this road
00:45:07.460you end up in like maha land of like i i can decide if i should get vaccines or whatever
00:45:12.820Right. Their expertise is real. Right. Yeah, exactly. Yes. But like, how do we how do we share decision making? How do we share collective knowledge? How do we think about structuring our communities and our decisions around care and other sort of incentives that aren't just sort of concentrating power and money and attention and influence all to the top?
00:45:35.200Right. Or to the side or, you know, to a person, whether that's an influencer on YouTube or, you know, the president or whatever else or your weird neighbor.
00:45:45.000Like, I mean, there's all sorts of ways that this can happen. And I think that recognizing those patterns is the first part of it.
00:45:53.040And then from there, we get to make a choice. And I think that that's really interesting.
00:45:57.580And someone I know just said something recently to me. So I'm going to say it because it's been on my mind a lot, which is that we use the phrase make a choice.