00:00:00.000Welcome back to Dreaming Against the Machine. I'm your host, Adam Becker. This week's guest
00:00:07.860is Alondra Nelson, who is a sociologist of science at the Institute for Advanced Study
00:00:14.280in Princeton and used to run the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under
00:00:21.920Joe Biden. And I feel like that right there tells you why I wanted to have her on this
00:00:28.440show, but I think politics is important. I think politics is something that happens the minute
00:00:34.000that you have more than one person in a room. And I think that it will always be with us.
00:00:40.280And I think that governance and policy are important things. And if we are going to think
00:00:47.540about what a better future could look like, we are going to need to talk about what a better
00:00:51.460politics and policy should look like. And that means that we have to talk with people who have
00:00:56.500been on the inside. And Alondra spans two worlds, that world, but also the world of
00:01:04.440studying science itself from the inside and the outside. And that's something that she and I have
00:01:11.820in common. And so I thought she would make a great guest for this show. And unsurprisingly,
00:01:17.640I was right, but that says a lot less about my acumen in picking guests for the show and a lot
00:01:23.500more about Alondra herself. So here's Alondra. Alondra, welcome to Dreaming Against the Machine.
00:01:36.420Thank you, Adam. Good to see you. Yeah, it's good to see you too. It's been a minute. I was out
00:01:41.340there last fall when you very kindly invited me down to Princeton to have me go to that
00:01:48.280wonderful talk by Will Oliver. Yeah, we're trying to think about quantum. I mean, you know, my lab
00:01:54.440works in the space of emerging technologies. And so trying to get a beat on quantum as it's,
00:02:00.720you know, much like genomics and AI, it's got the commercialization space and it's got the
00:02:06.580basic research space and those things aren't quite aligned. And so it makes for a fascinating
00:02:11.160discussion. Yeah, no. And that was also very helpful when I was writing that quantum computing
00:02:16.120a story for Scientific American. What? I guess it was the June issue. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. But this
00:02:25.800is also a good segue to introducing you. I would attempt to introduce you and I would be terrified
00:02:32.680of getting it wrong. Can you tell us what your lab works on and more generally who you are?
00:02:39.520So I'm a sociologist of science and technology, always with a through line thinking about
00:02:45.700social implications, social inequality. I have had lots of faculty appointments. So I've taught,
00:02:52.560I've been on the faculty of Yale at Columbia. Now I'm at the Institute for Advanced Study.
00:02:57.140And I have a lab called the Science, Technology, and Social Values Lab. And we look at, right now,
00:03:03.720a lot, we're working a lot on AI and the social implications of AI. But thinking about my previous
00:03:08.660work has been on genetics and genomics. And I'm also thinking about, I'm interested very much in
00:03:13.340outer space policy, quantum, and its implications. What else to say? I had imagined my life,
00:03:22.140if I was thinking about futures, not against the machine, but against what my plan was for my life,
00:03:28.060did not include politics or a political appointment. But in 2016, I started working
00:03:34.360on what was going to be my third monograph, and it was going to be on science and technology
00:03:39.360policy in the Obama administration. So I started interviewing folks who had worked very, you know,
00:03:44.300at DARPA, OSTP, et cetera, but it was really more of a book on the White House Office of Science
00:03:49.560and Technology Policy. Through that research and learning to know, coming to know lots of people
00:03:54.900who work in that space, I was asked to work on the, after there was a Biden-Harris ticket to
00:04:00.600work on the campaign, writing policy memos, trying to think about, in a prior moment, how to, you
00:04:06.400know, quote unquote, as the campaign said, build back better, but build back better things that
00:04:10.120had been happening in the space around science and research. And then I was asked to consider
00:04:15.340being interviewed for a leadership role in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. And I
00:04:19.880ended up working there for just over two years at OSTP doing policy on AI and other things. So
00:04:26.140there's a kind of before and after. And since that time, I've done, you know, I think academics
00:04:31.700always like to imagine that our work has social implications. And if you're writing an NSF grant,
00:04:36.400You've got to think about the broader impacts, et cetera.
00:04:39.040But since that time, I've come to be working, you know, very much in thinking about policy, both in kind of public discourse and, you know, in collaborating with policymakers.
00:04:47.380So I am, you know, a sociologist who's thinking about, you know, dreaming against the machine, I guess, or thinking about futures and how.
00:04:56.100But now, you know, having worked in Washington, I have a new tool, which is like how policy helps to potentially done well, done at its best, can also help to steward futures that we want and mitigate futures we don't want.
00:05:09.420Great. And I think, correct me if I'm wrong, that you're being overly modest here.
00:05:15.460You ran the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy for a time, didn't you? You were in charge of it.
00:05:21.980I did, yeah. For just under a year, I was the acting director of OSTP, so that portfolio
00:05:27.980includes everything from astrophysics to agriculture to genomics, pandemics, you know,
00:05:36.620AI, quantum. It was not anticipated, but it was the honor of a lifetime, and it's an
00:05:44.080incredible team, and I think I learned a lot as a researcher, as a social science researcher,
00:05:48.800about collaboration, because I think, you know, many of us work in fields that are you can work
00:05:55.920on a big collaboration, but you can also just do the one off book. And I had mostly been somebody
00:06:00.880who worked in small collaborations or one off. And the incredible thing about a place like OSTP,
00:06:06.300which during my time had, you know, a team of like it was still a small White House agency,
00:06:11.740but about 150 people was that they come literally from all over the country, from all walks of life.
00:06:17.100I mean, our world, you know, talking to you as a former lapsed, I don't know how you would describe yourself, academic, Adam, journalist, academic turned journalist, you know, we think we live in this like very variegated world and we're really like one degree of separation from like pretty much any other academic, even if you're in a different field, you know, there's some kind of, yeah.
00:06:36.060And this was just like, I literally did not know these people and we did not have overlapping even, you know, it was like three degrees of separation. So then how do you do a project, the project, which is the sort of mission of advancing what we hope is, you know, positive outcomes with and through science and technology for more than 330 million people? Like, wow.
00:06:59.880academics are like we can collaborate but do we like each other and like do we want to have coffee
00:07:05.620together do we want to be at conferences together yeah and you know i think working in the white
00:07:10.900house it was the answer to all those questions is like no but we are you know we are united uh
00:07:16.980in this mission that's just bigger than all of that so i've come back you know part of what i've
00:07:22.380brought back for me from washington is i hope i think more agility and being a good collaborator
00:07:28.340I had been at IIS since 2019. I established my lab when I got back here because I wanted to be
00:07:33.860able to kind of operationalize what I learned about collaboration. So that's, yeah, that's
00:07:39.620one thing to say about DC. Well, I have to imagine that given what's happened since you left DC,
00:07:48.820the return of Trump, that you are not happy with what's going on with science and technology
00:07:58.320policy in the u.s right now and i mean i well let me let me let you respond to that and then i will
00:08:05.380tell you what i think and we can talk about it we work in different parts of the kind of research
00:08:10.180ecosystem so i would love to hear what you think about this i mean there's a couple ways to answer
00:08:15.180to begin i think you know there's the question that happened you know right after the election
00:08:19.280that i got was like oh you worked on all this stuff and now there's a new administration and
00:08:24.640it's probably all going to disappear and don't you feel sad and I think what you learn working
00:08:29.480you know as a political appointee is that another administration even if it's a different you know
00:08:34.900even if we had been followed by a Kamala Harris administration would have just had different
00:08:39.000priorities and some things advance and some things don't advance and you like literally should not I
00:08:44.200hope I mean many people do like cannot take it personally like that's just the like churn of
00:08:49.000administrations. And so I've never taken, I think, any of the churn or the change or the, you know,
00:08:54.920halting or transformation of the work that we've done in OSTB personally. I think, you know, as a
00:09:00.620thinking person, I think we had figured out in many instances the best way to do the thing, you
00:09:05.380know. And so I think with the sort of arrogance of the thinking, sometimes overthinking person,
00:09:11.680we thought, like, we figured this out. Like, don't you just, can't you see this is the best plan?
00:09:15.280And, you know, other people have different ideas. So, you know, so that's that's the kind of small answer.
00:09:21.240The big answer is that what we're facing right now is, you know, fairly catastrophic for the American research ecosystem.
00:09:29.660Yeah. The United States is the world's single biggest funder of research and development worldwide.
00:09:35.740And so even if we so, you know, a year ago or so, you know, folks were saying, well, you know, maybe the EU kind of horizon grants and funding or, you know, France is doing this and there are these different projects and U.S. expenditure to research and development really just dwarf all of those.
00:09:53.580And so when the U.S. sort of pulls back, much like and not unrelated to what's happening in geopolitics, when the U.S. sort of changes its R&D ecosystem, it's actually changing the whole world system, right?
00:10:05.540It's changing a market system. It's changing a geopolitical system. And obviously, it has all of these national security implications as well.
00:10:12.020And so we're in the midst of a kind of chaotic reordering. And in the middle of that are the loss of people's lives and livelihoods, the loss of, I think, long-term investments we had begun to make in young people and just sort of the capacity of lots of young people, K-12 through postdoc, to be able to do science wherever they kind of fit in or slot in there.
00:10:38.660and just the capacity to, you know, to know what a time where we're trying to, you know,
00:10:45.180we've got AI, this kind of emerging technology. What do we know about it? What can we know about
00:10:50.040it? What do we know about its basic foundations, its social implications? And I think the sort of
00:10:55.520rug pull for really important technological changes that are happening now. And then on top
00:11:01.680of that, this kind of whole reordering is really just catastrophic. And, you know, I was speaking
00:11:06.900to someone about this recently and they said, well, you know, and they were playing devil's
00:11:10.520advocate and I totally appreciate it. They said, well, two years, another administration comes back,
00:11:15.640you know, Congress puts all the money back and it's all fine, right? It's like, no, it's not
00:11:19.740all fine. Actually, we have broken rules and norms. We've broken contracts. Universities that
00:11:25.100had built capacity to do research can't just put that back when you no longer have the people doing
00:11:29.640the work. People are changing fields. We've lost the goodwill and trust of some of our, you know,
00:11:34.700I started talking about collaboration, some of our collaborators. And, you know, I don't know
00:11:40.140how you get that back. And so it is, I think it's easy to focus on what's happening at NSF.
00:11:47.720And for my own discipline, you know, they've dissolved the social and behavioral and economic
00:11:52.780research directorate in full, which was like, I think, 1% of the NSF budget. So there's all of
00:11:58.020that. And then there's like our inability to, for Congress to really exercise its power to ensure
00:12:04.540that money that is appropriate is being used for the things it's supposed to be used for.
00:12:08.900So even if all of the budgets stay the same or come back, we now have created a practice
00:12:15.820in government in which the money that's appropriated doesn't actually go for the vision that the
00:12:21.840people's representatives in Congress say science and technology should be doing, be invested
00:12:30.620I mean, everything that you just said sounds about right to me, but I just keep thinking about, I mean, I'm going to make a comparison that I'm always hesitant to make.
00:12:40.320My first book was about the history of quantum physics. Quantum physics has been around for about 100 years and most of the originators of it were in Germany between World War I and World War II was when we first really came up with the first real theories of quantum physics.
00:13:00.620Quantum physics and the rise to power of Hitler changed the way that science was done in Germany.
00:13:10.700Germany had been far and away the world's premier scientific superpower.
00:13:15.660You know, the international language of science was, if anything, German.
00:13:20.100And then Hitler came to power and immediately, you know, one of the very, very first things that his government did was to fire everyone Jewish who was in the civil service, which included every single Jewish university professor.
00:13:37.420And so just very, very quickly, science in Germany was decimated. That was the beginning, or depending on how you look at it, I guess, the end of a process where the U.S. became the world's scientific superpower and English became the international language of science.0.71
00:14:00.820And this just looks a lot like that. And I mean, okay, listeners, for those of you who don't know, which I guess would be most of you, one of the reasons I'm hesitant to make these comparisons is my family has a history with persecution by the Nazis.
00:14:20.280My grandfather's entire immediate family was murdered by the Nazis.
00:14:24.120And so I don't take it lightly making these comparisons, you know, and of course, there's
00:14:28.860the old Internet rule, Godwin's law comparisons to the Nazis mean that you lose the argument.
00:14:34.680But I this just seems this does seem like an echo of that.
00:14:42.260It seems like, you know, history rhyming, as it were.
00:14:45.820And I am not sure how we come back from this.
00:14:50.540I mean, you know, everything you just said, the part where I was thinking, yeah, that's what I've been telling people when I talk about this is when you said, yeah, we can't just put the funding back.
00:14:59.780That doesn't fix everything because, you know, some things that are done can't be easily undone.
00:15:05.380And this is not to say that the system that we had in place before was perfect.
00:15:12.740There are all sorts of problems with it, but, you know, certainly it's much, much better than what's going on right now.
00:15:23.360But this is Dreaming Against the Machine, and we try to think about what a good future might look like.
00:15:28.420And so I'm going to put you on the spot, Alondra.
00:15:32.460You just said that you don't know how we build it back, but how do we get this back?
00:15:38.320assume that, you know, in two years, Trump and his, his cronies are gone permanently this time.
00:15:46.680What do we do? How do we, how do we build a better future for scientific research,
00:15:52.860not just in the U S but around the world? Well, first of all, let me just say,
00:15:56.240I'm so sorry about your family history. Um, that's, you know, traumatic and catastrophic.
00:16:00.920And I totally resonate with what it takes for you to make that comparison more than even
00:16:05.140others of us right you know like you know that's not something you think take lightly
00:16:09.040you know if i'll just talk about my own background i mean i think one of my early projects and i don't
00:16:14.240know if we're going to talk about this was trying to build out what we now called afrofuturism but
00:16:18.940you know part of what was uh in the early thinking of afrofuturism is kind of canonical
00:16:23.380sort of essay was really like how do you come from a past which is the descendants of enslaved
00:16:30.180people who like literally had no agency over their future and like imagine other kinds of
00:16:35.000futures. And so that for me is I think fuel for the necessity of having, if not optimism, hope
00:16:43.620and always trying to find other ways, new ways, orthogonal ways, you know, trickster ways of
00:16:50.340thinking about what we might do in the future. And so I think exactly to your point, like my,
00:16:57.020as a sociologist of science and technology, I would probably position most of my past work
00:17:02.280in the space of reform. So I was never like status quo. So great. You know, like sitting
00:17:09.560here in my office in IAS, you think about somebody like Oppenheimer and the Manhattan
00:17:13.240Project. So great that we use all of our talents to like bomb things, you know, and kill people0.96
00:17:18.220like, no, you know, not amazing that places like a precursor to the NIH, like experimented0.97
00:17:25.400on Black people, experimented on Black soldiers, you know, did unethical research, like not great
00:17:31.260that many communities have been excluded from even being able to do science. I mean, so there's just
00:17:36.160so many things that were just not fantastic, but that were getting better and that there was at
00:17:41.360least a space to have a conversation about. So that said, you know, last summer, about a year
00:17:48.380ago, I started a project with a colleague who teaches at UC Santa Cruz named Jenny Reardon,
00:17:54.080And we call it the public's science. And it is exactly to your point, Adam. It's like, if we are going to build something else or we're going to have to, what should that look like? And we thought that it should be much more publicly engaged, much more publicly accountable, much more sort of transparent to the public.
00:18:13.160Some of the work that I did working in the Biden administration and some of, you know, you saw a little bit of this in the Obama administration as well.
00:18:21.220Their eight years of science policy was trying to do a little bit more of that.
00:18:25.220So one of the policies I worked on was making a federally funded research findings or papers like the initial freely available to the American taxpayers.
00:18:37.100Right. So just this. And, you know, we this sort of came to a head during covid where the science was moving really fast and the public were experiencing paywalls as like, you know, people trying to keep information from them about fast moving science.
00:18:52.040In some instances, it's just like, oh, no, I've got to pay to get access to my own paper that I wrote.
00:18:56.400No, it's not just, you know, no, it's not a kind of vast conspiracy.
00:18:59.200So we convened a bunch of people, about almost 22 dozen people, and we are doing a double special issue of the Annals of Political and Social Science that will come out, I think, probably in October.
00:19:09.800And it's just soliciting from lots of people other ideas.
00:19:12.880I don't have the, you know, the ideas, but I think it can be, you know, in a moment in which you have a kind of Maha movement that's saying we don't trust vaccines and we don't trust science.
00:19:25.560Like, I don't know what to do about that.
00:19:27.920I will say, you know, there are parts of the black tradition that are very distrustful of science as well.1.00
00:19:33.940So I know how to do what to do about that.0.77
00:19:36.020And I think you give people access to information and you can't control whether or not they create a big red string, you know, kind of thing on their wall with it, you know, but you try to give them, you know, the access to the information.
00:20:51.280I mean, one of the things that was surprising to me, Adam, when I worked in government was like how little we knew about like where money went.
00:20:57.600I think governments need to make public good choices, choices about the commons that are not about a cost benefit analysis and a strict market sense.
00:21:07.400Like, you know, we just need vaccines for everybody. And if like and we just need to pay for it.
00:21:11.560Like, for example, it's not like, you know, how do we afford it? We just figure out a way to afford it, for example.
00:21:18.380So I want you to hear, you know, I'm not saying I want like for every federal investment in science and technology,
00:21:24.560for every federal investment in physics, we want a kind of ROI calculation. But I was struck in my
00:21:30.020time working in government, how little we know about like where things are spent. Like if someone
00:21:35.080asked you, you know, Londra Nelson's had some, you know, federal grants, what federal grants has
00:21:39.920she had over X many years? And what has she been working on? Like there was no way to find that
00:21:44.480information. Like there's no kind of seriously, right? So there's fields, you know, people are
00:24:09.580i was just thinking while you were talking about how yes we make those investments and and it really
00:24:19.580does feel like the business model or i don't feel like the business model it is the business model
00:24:25.760for some of these companies to you know have the government subsidize the risky part of the
00:24:32.300research. And then, you know, we socialize the costs of the risky parts of the research and then
00:24:40.560privatize the benefits. And I feel like part of the disconnect for the public of, you know,
00:24:47.360not seeing the value of basic research, you know, not that I'm saying that basic research always has
00:24:54.120to have a financial return, but it often does. And I think it would be good to have more of those
00:25:00.160benefits socialized as well. And I suppose they are in the sense that like, you know, we get the
00:25:05.180vaccines and whatnot, but it's just the extreme concentrations of private wealth. The obvious
00:25:14.260example here, I guess, is Elon Musk. That money that he has, a lot of it comes from doing that
00:25:22.240on a on a mass scale uh letting the government subsidize the risky parts and then he just
00:25:30.280reaps the profits you and i know that but i think a lot of other people don't i mean i think people
00:25:36.780driving their teslas and um you know using starlink which is increasingly becoming a utility
00:25:43.180for the world yeah don't really uh you know and this is where i think i get i i i have you know
00:25:50.840I have such mixed feelings about the Trump administration taking sort of financial stakes
00:25:55.240in companies. But when you look at something like Tesla, that was really, you know, quite a bit
00:25:59.900financed by American taxpayer money in a first instance, you do think like, well, you know,
00:26:05.740sort of what's in it for the rest of us who sort of helped to sort of build the capacity to do this.
00:26:11.080So I also think, you know, there there's a consolidation of the money and the power and
00:26:17.860the technology um and then there's the super equally important particularly for a figure like
00:26:24.360musk is the the capture of the imagination right you know and so i think and i don't you know i
00:26:30.380didn't live during the age of the robber barons i've only read about you know the progressive
00:26:34.840era and kind of how people were um but we didn't have uh the sort of mass communication in the same
00:26:41.620way um and and i think what makes this moment so terrifying sometimes actually is that power
00:26:49.560consolidation like sort of literally on all of these different valences all at once including
00:26:54.580the very ability to imagine and articulate and actually disseminate like you know your idea of
00:27:03.300what a good future looks like well i mean you know this but that's exactly what i was going after
00:27:07.900in my most recent book uh and i mean speaking of the robber barons i guess something that gives me
00:27:14.920hope is that you know we're going through a second gilded age and the first gilded age was
00:27:19.720followed by the progressive era but yeah i mean they they really have captured the imagination of
00:27:27.720what the future could be like you're right that we didn't have mass communication then the way
00:27:33.560that we do now although i suppose it was the early days of uh you know the robber barons were
00:27:40.160around when when we're building out the first systems of mass communication and mass transit
00:27:45.940radio telephone mass transit yeah yeah yeah exactly telegraphs i mean the thing that really
00:27:51.780gets me the thing that i've been really fighting against just in my in my public life and in my
00:27:58.380private life uh is is the ideas that these guys are pushing about ai yeah because there is this
00:28:04.380sense of inevitability and i keep talking with people and i mean i live here in the san francisco
00:28:09.920bay area and i see these billboards everywhere and i've talked about this on previous episodes but
00:28:14.280like the idea that ai is eating our idea of what the future can be and i think that that's a real
00:28:23.820tragedy right you know we have so many ways the future could be and we are being told no
00:28:30.320this one technology with this one vision of what it is is inevitable and has to keep going
00:28:39.360and it is going to be the single most important thing and putting aside questions about like okay
00:28:47.680why are we calling large language models ai the harms that are inflicted by building these things
00:28:54.200in the first place the environmental harms um and putting aside uh the sort of personal social harms
00:29:01.800that are created by putting them out into the world like the the incidence of ai psychosis and
00:29:07.280whatnot just this idea of uh the way that i mean to use another historically loaded word but the
00:29:14.420way that the idea of AI has colonized our idea of the future. Yep. A hundred percent is I think
00:29:21.360something that we really need to fight against. Totally agree. Tell me about how you think about
00:29:27.440that. Uh, I mean, you spent a lot of time thinking about AI. I'll talk about it. Um, maybe in two
00:29:32.760ways. First we'll be, um, we'll be around policy because I think I have, I think there's that we
00:29:38.180need to bring a different kind of philosophical approach to policymaking around technology.
00:29:42.680And if we think about, there's, you know, people think about policy and they think about getting, you know, going to a policy school to get a degree, but policy really is an articulation of a future, right? Like you are saying, like, you know, and so I try to think about policy as kind of proscriptive kind of future text.
00:30:02.280Like, this is a possible future that we could have if this law is passed, if this policy is implemented. And it is saying that this is the current state and we are, we're trying to steward a future state that looks like this and the policy becomes the vehicle for doing that, right?
00:30:18.820So I think when you get to AI, when people tell you that what should drive policy is the technology itself, right? You lose the ability to, this is one of the ways the features get captured, right? So you're just like, well, you know, the only, like, you know, I was at a conference in London over the weekend and I got, you know, a really smart question, but the person said, the technology is moving so fast, we can't possibly create any policy around it.
00:30:46.340And it's just like, well, policy is not the technology, you know, like this sort of sense that like every time you get a new release of a, you know, you go from Opus 4.5 to 4.8 or whatever, I don't even know what version we're at right now, that like you need to have a new policy as opposed to saying that policy is the future state that we want.
00:31:06.060So if we want a future state in which, and, you know, we can argue about what the future state is, where technology, these technologies aren't used at all, where, I mean, you know, my preference is like they are used, they are reined in, they are responsible that you've got, you know, you've got sort of across the life cycle of them, ways to check in, see what they're doing, you know, everything from risk assessments to pre-deployment assessments to audits after they're released, all of that.
00:31:31.260But if you only focus on the technology, we're not building the capacity to say we want a policy future state that like requires these things to happen.
00:31:41.360And that requires that, like, public investments, you know, and technology, you know, should be the thing, you know, and public expectations about technology, they shouldn't dirty our water, drive up our electric bills by 25%, etc., should be the thing on which policy is set, not the new release of the technology.
00:32:03.620So I think the policy space is so hard right now because lawmakers and advocates are allowing themselves to be captured by narratives that say that you only make policy around the technologies instead of anchoring it in the true north, which is like, what are social goods and what are public goods?
00:32:22.840And then how do we create policy that requires the purveyors, developers, and builders of these technologies to meet those benchmarks, like to meet those social good benchmarks, right, as opposed to a new technical benchmark.
00:32:37.580Another is, you know, I've been doing a project with a colleague at Harvard named Moira Weigel, who's a, like, you know, she's a comparativist.
00:32:47.500Yeah. So Moira and I have a project and part is on, it's like thinking about not just that industry leaders, VCs, you know, private equity folks have captured our future imagination, but what are the genres that they use to do so?
00:33:04.440So the project is looking, you know, we've got a postdoc colleague, Karina Albrecht, who's working on like sort of CEO keynote addresses, like, you know, everything from like, you know, Steve Jobs to Jensen Wang.
00:33:20.260It's like, what are the futures that are told in these kind of once a year, maybe twice a year kind of product release kind of, you know, Lollapaloozas that are not just, you know, they're marketing and the marketing is selling you a future, right?
00:33:34.580If you use this product with a new release of Siri or whatever, X things happen in the world.
00:33:40.760I'm working in particular on manifestos.
00:33:43.120Like I'm very interested in the manifesto as a form, both as a historical form.
00:33:48.620like so if you think about you know if you go back to the italian futurist you think about the 80s
00:33:53.000and 90s you think about or the early arts you think about cyber manifestos you know there was
00:33:58.700a lot of kind of feminist artist coalitions working on manifestos and now thinking about
00:34:03.880the manifesto today which is um not an artifact or genre of a collective right so you don't have
00:34:11.980to agree with the italian futurist but that manifesto was intended to like represent a
00:34:16.760collective vision of something. Ditto kind of feminist art manifestos, et cetera. Whereas0.83
00:34:22.580the manifesto today is like one guy and his grievance. Yeah, like Mark Andreessen, for
00:34:29.200example. So we've got this corpus of manifestos. We're coding them. They're super fascinating.
00:34:35.920And, you know, we're having friends and neighbors help with some of the coding. But I think, I mean,
00:34:42.080you know, they share with past manifestos of different kinds of political
00:34:45.420ilks, you know, that something's gone wrong in the world. We want to make it right. This is how
00:34:50.580we think we should do it. But I think this moment is so interesting in that the manifesto has become
00:34:56.000this vehicle of an individual. Like, it's not about a movement. It's me and what I think the
00:35:00.660world should be, and that I should have the power and authority to forecast and disseminate to the
00:35:07.480world my idea of what everybody else's future should look like you know they often don't even
00:35:11.720include a gesture at enrollment like adam you've read my manifesto don't you agree don't you want
00:35:17.420to join like there's not a call to action or an attempt to enroll it's just like i doth say and
00:35:23.160like we should sort of keep moving so there's also like the pitch deck which is i think a way in
00:35:28.760which the future is kind of captured so we're trying to look at these different um not only
00:35:33.580that the future has captured but the ways the gestures and the genres um that it takes that
00:35:38.440it takes the forms it takes oh my god i have so much to say about this you know how i feel about
00:35:43.700andresen's manifesto the techno optimist manifesto i loathe it it's one of my favorite punching bags
00:35:50.520and uh to the point where i sometimes feel like i'm overdoing it or i'm not being fair and then
00:35:57.740And I remember, no, no, no, no, no, no.
00:35:59.420Mark Andreessen is so, so far up there,
00:36:25.140and this goes back to your first point,
00:36:26.800is that anyone is even possibly talking about regulation of tech at all.
00:36:34.620I mean, I feel like in some ways that entire manifesto,
00:36:38.820this is almost certainly an overstatement,
00:36:40.620and I don't know what was going on in his head,
00:36:42.940but I think in some ways that entire manifesto is just Mark Andreessen saying,0.80
00:36:48.620I don't like that Lena Kahn has a position of power.
00:36:52.060Right. This idea that AI is moving too fast to regulate. This is just the latest version of something that Silicon Valley has been saying since its earliest days since or at least since the earliest days of the modern incarnation of the tech industry, you know, in the I don't know, late 80s, 90s in the in the early days of the Internet.
00:37:13.400they were saying, oh, well, it's moving too fast. You can't regulate it. And there were manifestos
00:37:20.020then too, right? I mean, the Declaration of Independence of cyberspace. Exactly. And we've
00:37:25.020seen what that leads to, right? Because people listened to them. People thought, oh, yeah,
00:37:30.620they're right. It is moving too fast to regulate. And then this is where we ended up. But even
00:37:37.960something like the Declaration of Independence of cyberspace or some of the 90s to early aughts
00:37:43.220manifestos at the very least, like, even if you didn't, didn't agree with them, we're trying to
00:37:49.820make a collective claim for, you know, like, I think what I find so striking about the kind of
00:37:57.200contemporary tech manifesto version is that they're just often about the self and like the will to
00:38:03.580power of the self. And, you know, we don't, you know, we're not in a bigger world. It doesn't,
00:38:07.820I don't care what everyone else thinks. I mean, you know, I think you talk about the,
00:38:10.860the techno optimist manifesto it's really like there's constraint all around me and i shall not
00:38:16.280be constrained and like so on the one hand right we want agency and freedom but on the other hand
00:38:22.200to live in society to live in community means that there are some constraints on all of us
00:38:29.460right you know to have a marriage means that there's some constraints right you know um
00:38:33.240as as we you know as we know and so sure but like they uh sorry not to interrupt no like that's
00:38:38.660exactly what they don't believe, right? They don't believe that we live in a society as the
00:38:44.380meme says. No, exactly. And so you see that kind of manifest and utopian to some, dystopic to most
00:38:52.980of us, these articulations of futures that only apply to a few, don't include people. The manifesto
00:38:59.760is a genre of grievance. And I think it's not for naught that the acceleration of that as the genre
00:39:06.980form of articulating futures is what we're living with right now. I mean, I think it says a lot
00:39:13.380about the politics of this moment. What more perfect genre could there be for polarization,
00:39:18.580for polarized, you know, a kind of society than the manifesto in some regard? Yeah.
00:39:25.400I'm thinking about what you said. It hadn't occurred to me, but of course, you're completely
00:39:28.800right that the manifesto used to be a sort of collective articulation and now is this more
00:39:36.260personal thing when it comes from the tech industry and i just have to think that that has to do with
00:39:43.160the rise of tech billionaires right the difference between the tech industry at the time of the
00:39:49.820declaration of independence of cyberspace which when was that that was like 94 uh somewhere around
00:39:56.140something like that yeah yeah and andreessen's techno optimist manifesto which is what 30 years
00:40:01.340later uh 2023 is that in 1994 uh there were no tech you know billionaires or there there
00:40:09.600certainly were no software billionaires except maybe bill gates bill gates yeah um but other
00:40:15.520than that like there there weren't the tech industry was not the single dominant industry
00:40:20.000of american society at the time i mean it certainly not financially that was i don't know
00:40:25.420in the in the early 90s or mid 90s i guess that would have been banking or something like that
00:40:29.460Whereas now, you know, it's the tech industry and suddenly we have this, you know, this second Gilded Age and these robber barons in a way that we did not have in the 90s.
00:40:44.040And so, of course, they're going to go out there and say, you know, well, this is my feeling, except Mark Andreessen in his manifesto is still using the first person plural, right?
00:40:54.520He still says we without saying who we are.
00:40:57.780And I think, yeah, and I think that's distinctive. I mean, it makes the claim for the we, but it's really not a we or it doesn't define the we or describe the we, you know, and I, yeah. So anyways, we could go down that rabbit hole for a while. But I mean, I think some of the way, you know, you said, you know, you're trying to sort of fight back in the narrative way.
00:41:16.140I think partly what, you know, Moira, Karina and I and some other colleagues are trying to do is understand the sort of narrative form that these claims on the future take and the power, like, you know, what is the emotional power?
00:41:31.380Manifestors have an emotional power, right?
00:41:33.360I think, you know, I was really interested, you know, we can talk about Alex Karp, you know, sent out a couple of months ago, you know, a tweet that was, you know, best I can tell, you know, I don't know what chatbot, Claude Grock distillation of his book.
00:44:07.660Anyway, I have so many more things that I would want to ask you, but I know that we're running short on time.
00:44:12.880So I am going to ask you two last questions real quick.
00:44:18.300The first one is, what is your favorite piece of science fiction and why?
00:44:24.700Or, you know, speculative fiction about what a future could look like?
00:44:29.780Oh, I'm just going to tell you the two things I've been watching recently, because that's usually my favorite. Well, okay, my all-time favorite forever forever is always going to be Octavia Butler. It's always going to be Kendred, which people don't place in the science fiction categories, one of her early novels.
00:44:45.860yeah but it is science fiction it is science fiction and it also is so resonant with the
00:44:52.740experience of black people or people and i think um maybe it resonates with you given your family's
00:44:58.740history the sense that you could always be snatched back like that you could always like
00:45:02.980for all the progress for all the change um i've been also thinking about kindred because it's set
00:45:08.520during the bicentennial so as we're having our semi sem quintennial you know kind of celebrations
00:45:14.700you know it's it's it's all of the like it's it starts in june of 17 of 1976 the end of it is
00:45:20.900july 4th 1976 and it's just like her being snatched back to the past in this sort of sense
00:45:26.280that we live past present future all at once so that's like all time hands down that book changed
00:45:31.620my life forever yeah but what i've been watching are two one different things so i've been i've
00:45:37.880just started watching starfleet academy love god i really really need to watch it i'm so excited to
00:45:43.360see it i just it is just it gives you all the like star trek goodness you know but it's also
00:45:50.360got like new characters and there's new you know new races from different planets and you know
00:45:57.520just all of that like sort of goodness there's always i think in all of those the sense of the
00:46:02.740underdog and uh the sense of of looming kind of global you know kind of domination and this
00:46:09.760series it's uh they've come out of much like i mean go back to butler much like sort of parable
00:46:16.340of the sower have come out of like a deeply deeply dystopic time and it's sort of what does
00:46:20.620it mean in this case to like rebuild starfleet academy what does it mean in the butler case to
00:46:25.460sort of rebuild a communal life and a communal religion communal spirituality for all of us
00:46:31.020then i stumbled across something called the copenhagen test do you know what this is on
00:46:36.840peacock no what is this which is okay so it's it's fascinating on a couple levels so it's about a
00:46:43.040chinese american um spy so i think he's like a cia operative or something but because he's chinese
00:46:51.520american he is distrusted like so it's it's like well you know your country of origin origin so
00:46:58.920there's this kind of through line um that we know from if if you read kind of any asian american
00:47:04.800studies or you know kind of ethnic studies literature this kind of constant questioning
00:47:08.880of like loyalty of true citizenship like whether or not your parents were you know your family was
00:47:14.360here in california during the gold rush like 200 years ago whatever it's this kind of question
00:47:18.620but it is also this kind of sci-fi thriller a bit you know without giving too much away he's
00:47:25.940basically like a walking wi-fi tower someone has biohacked his brain and all of this kind of
00:47:32.700espionage and intrigue ensues. It's like absolutely fascinating. So those are, those are my,
00:47:38.000so my all time favorites are always in Octavia Butler world, but those are my current two
00:47:42.100favorites. I love this answer. What about you? What about you? Oh God. Well, okay. So first of
00:47:47.560all, let me explain why I love your answer while I'm thinking in the back of my head about what
00:47:50.960my answer is, but no, I love this answer. Not only because you've given me a new piece of science
00:47:56.920fiction to go take a look at i've never heard of the copenhagen test but also i'm so glad a that
00:48:04.680you're a star trek fan and b that i didn't find this out until the end of the episode because
00:48:08.160otherwise that's all we would have talked about oh we could have gone there yes yeah yeah we'll
00:48:12.620have to have you back and and just talk about okay but um uh for me i mean i'm just gonna do
00:48:18.780the same thing you did and talk about what i've been reading and watching lately uh so one tv show
00:48:24.400one book i really enjoyed pluribus and i'm very excited for the next season and i'm currently
00:48:30.640reading a very odd sort of science fiction series that uh i think it's obviously science fiction i
00:48:39.400think some people would disagree i did find it in the science fiction section of a bookstore uh
00:48:44.440it's called on the calculation of volume and it's about a woman trapped in a time loop and it's a
00:48:49.460series of, it's a series of books originally in Danish. They're very short and, uh, each one is
00:48:57.760very short, but there's apparently seven volumes and only, I think four of them have been translated
00:49:02.000into English so far. So I'm just finishing up the first one and, um, it's fascinating. Anyway,
00:49:08.780we have time for one more very quick question, I think. Uh, so I am going to ask you,
00:49:14.820And Alondra, what are you feeling hopeful about?
00:49:18.380I think I am feeling, I mean, this ties to our whole conversation.
00:49:21.060I'm feeling hopeful that I come from a tradition, a genealogy, a community of people and their