David Graeber: On Bureaucratic Technologies & the Future as Dream-Time / 01.19.2012 @ SVA

one of the most exciting things about the Occupy movement is that people are asking fundamental questions that haven't been asked in America in quite a long time this is the beginning of the beginning when people begin to ask fundamental questions again it's important to have people involved who can give historical context to these questions in his new book debt the first 5000 years David Graeber asks the question how is it that moral obligations between people come to be thought of as debts and as a result end up obligations between people between people come to be thought of as debts and as a result end up justifying behavior that would otherwise seem utterly immoral he then pursues this question through 5000 years of human history he's especially good at unraveling those assumptions that quote have become so much a part of our common sense that we find it hard to imagine any other possible arrangement I've mentioned many times in this series that there's a politics of clear writing of writing for a broad audience rather than for specialists using specialized language great book on debt as an exemplary case in point he deals with a very complicated history the history of money and debt in a straightforward common-sense way he may disagree with his analysis or his conclusions but you'll have no problem following his argument and I must add one follows this highly complex argument with pleasure to boot this also has a politics the politics of pleasure I've been reading David Graeber --zz work for some time but I knew I wanted to ask him to appear in this series when I recently read his account of the art in immaterial labor conference at the Tate Modern in 2008 and found it to be one of the clearest most honest and most hopeful things I've read in quite a while about the relation between art and politics near the end of that essay he points to can temporary dilemma the revolutionary future appears increasingly implausible to most of us but neither can we simply get rid of it genuine knowledge of this future is impossible but is only from the perspective of this unknowable outside that any real knowledge of the present is possible the future has become our dream time I think he's going to expand on that tonight please welcome David Graeber thanks for giving away my punchline to well figure out something new to say about it I must say it's it's kind of thrilling for me to stand in this room um although also confusing because actually I grew up there right above here and the Penn South coops my department overlooked this movie theater I remember growing up in the early 60s um watching strange lights creep slowly across my ceiling I couldn't sleep from some effect of the projectors I think those things right there so actually getting to see them going back there it was really kind of thrilling the other real memory I have of this room mom again from being very young was I was going to see a movie here and and watching um as I looked up at late shows a lot um watching the incredible beauty of this sort of shapes and kerlick use that formed when cigarette smoke was struck by the projector light nothing awesomely beautiful thing that I guess people of our younger generation never will never get to see um I was right there um remember from when I was five or six so you know it was very thrilling to be speaking here all right um I want to speak about the future and I recently wrote an essay for the Baffler when Baffler is one of these magazines that keeps appearing and reappearing and it's reappearing again in March and they asked me to write a piece and I thought alright I'm famous now I guess one of the things you can do when you're famous is you can do all those things that you always really wanted about but never could because no one would take you seriously or they laughed at the very idea so that's what I'm going to do I'm going to expand on this notion of the future that I've talked about in the art and material labor paper but related to something that has been bothering me well holding back to that time when I used to stare at the smoke here in this room um when I was five or six it didn't bother me yet but but at that time we all had a very clear idea about what this time 2012 was supposed to be like um all of us growing up the 60s and I think this is true people growing up in the 70s and 80s - and we had an almost kickin list of things that we expected to happen I remember really well you know calculating that I would be almost 40 years old in the year 2000 and of course by then we would be on Mars um and you know there would be anti-gravity boots and flying cars and um teleportation devices and work drive and tractor beams and you know all that stuff um and I really think it's one of the experiences of my generation and and much of the ones after have been this experience of like incredible disappointment which we can't express because you know when we think about everybody Alisa's oh you mean all that Jetsons stuff like it was just a cartoon yeah you sucker I mean I know you were silly to have ever believed it it was just something for kids but actually no I mean if you look at the time like you know very reputable sources you go to the museums you go to like National Geographic they would show maps of what the big Space Station and the Mars launch was going to be like um we had every reason to believe this um and even more so even more so it's actually historically plausible to believe that this was the case because if you think about it if you look at the early part of the 19th of the 20th century room.you period around 1900 you're a kid growing up reading Jules Verne in 1900 you know there was a list of things that you expected to be invented by say 1950 um you know there were submarines there were rocket ships airplanes um there were going to be radios and TVs and things like that and sure enough there were I mean pretty much I mean you know they didn't get the time machine there is a few that that didn't happen but you know for the most part most of the things that they expected to have been created by the time they were my age 50 um they got so what happened because you know you have this whole generation where you have a similar list of science fiction inventions which everybody expects they're going to have 50 years later and you know maybe it's unrealistic to imagine we could have gotten all of them but we didn't actually get any I'm not a single one I mean you know people talk about well you know iPhones are a little bit like a Star Trek communicator and not really um we certainly don't have anything like tricorders right um and even the stuff that seemed like they were about to emerge like you know clones and cryogenics they all kind of flopped and didn't really happen you know and and things that you would really imagine actually were technically possible had they pursued it I mean they if they could get to the moon by 1968 presumably they could have gotten to Mars if they'd really been trying or robotics um you know it's presumably not absolutely impossible to build a robot that could take your laundry down wash it and bring it back again but you know this sort of research simply hasn't been done so I think that almost everyone has grown up with this sort of secret and secret disappointment but also a secret shame because they feel like idiots ever having really believed that they should have this to begin with so we can't talk about it and occasionally you see on the internet like the flying cars issue but it's almost a way to laugh at people oh yeah you were promised flying cars um now what strikes me that I remember around 2000 like waiting for the reflections on this um all the people talking about what how are we imagining our place in history of the turn of the millennium so I thought that'd be a reflection on like you know what the world in 2000 was supposed to be like and what it's actually like but I didn't see any I mean maybe there are a few I missed but there really was not prominently displayed instead you had people acting as if breathtaking new technologies were in fact emerging the internet I guess but I mean I always say if you take a science fiction fan of the 1950's and show them the Internet you know they would have been impressed but then if they found out that was like the best thing we'd actually managed to come up with you know what would their reaction likely to have been but you know like this thing is it's basically you know it's fast and it's convenient but it's basically a combination of a post-office a mail-order catalogue and a library that's it and what about the computers you can talk to the robots could thank you so it strikes me that there's a kind of a cultural trauma which like all traumas can't be directly expressed but comes out in other ways and one of the first thoughts I had about this when I was trying to formulate it was to think about simulation that perhaps what we call the postmodern sensibility is really just or a flow you know a series of reflections on this trauma that we can't express um first occurred to me when I was watching some I think it was one of the newer Star Wars movies which were of course great embarrassment um as movies but they did have very good special effects and sitting watching one thinking you know people watch those science fiction movies in the fifty is they had such cheesy special effects I thought those guys would be really impressed if they like saw this kind of special effects we have nowadays then of course I realized obviously you know they wouldn't they thought we'd actually be doing this stuff by now it's 2011 um you know all we've done is come up with really incredibly sophisticated ways to simulate it I saw a bell went off my head a simulation and everything simulation history doesn't have a direction everything's ironic repetition it's all you know hyper real simulation of course you know nobody be saying that if we actually were on Mars so perhaps this entire discourse was really a way of talking about technological disappointment that we couldn't express directly because we felt embarrassed who have ever believed it to begin with um and with this in mind I started researching a little bit and I discovered something very interesting which was that the phrase post-modernism of course as we all know is framed by preterite Jameson and on 1984 actually I believe he wrote the famous essay and it was actually a reflection not on purely what it was originally framed it was in relation to technology but not in the way that we ordinarily think it was on a reflection on what he imagined would be the emerging sort of ideological superstructure or cultural superstructure for a technological infrastructure that people thought was going to develop but actually didn't it was very interesting um because at the time Ernst Mandal and the idea of the Third Way of technology is there's the Agricultural Revolution there is the Industrial Revolution and now there's supposed to be the information revolution the information revolution when it was originally conceived was actually going to be accompanied by new forms of energy robotics and essentially new technologies that would wait make work obsolete and if you read people writing in the 60s almost all radical thinkers had embraced that's really all mantle was doing was taking what were popular expectations at the time and giving the theoretical cast to it is that anybody from the situation as to the apiece um they were all saying pretty much the same thing they're about to come out with robot factories it's really about to happen work is going to disappear let the machines do all the work we're going to enter a new civilization where we don't have to work um now what Jameson was saying is all right this is all going to happen robots are going to replace workers we're all going to be sitting there you know working at computers all day um what is the appropriate sort of cultural sensibility for this new worklist reality and he had various interesting comments about the political implications you know the futurist fascination with speed energy and um how that seemed to have revolutionary implications these it's about Marin Nettie's celebration the machine got in the motorcar these are still visible emblems sculptural modes of energy which give tangibility and figuration to the mode of energies of that early moment of modernization in ways which revolutionary communist artists of the 1930s also thought to reappropriation sort of cool surface of the some new technologies but it wasn't framed as it was later to be as simply information technology it was assumed to come along with the robot factories that everybody was expecting of course what happens the robot factories don't materialize um instead and there were actually strikes in the early 70s um there's some duck it's largely a forgotten history but the zero worked group actually recorded some of this stuff um there are people actually beginning to striking we're sick of working where the robot factory is you know happened in Michigan right it was actually one of the reasons they started relocating the plants they're shutting them down when were tossed our labor force um now so in a way you know what happens um they produce a sort of simulation of what was supposed to happen they move the factories to places in Mexico and Southeast Asia where you have docile labor forces working to work actually a much lower technological um with a lower technological infrastructure of production than often they had in Europe in America and so it seems as if the factories disappear but in fact well you're using much more intensive labor than before and somehow they managed to come up with a way where actually people end up working much more as a result so the hours that people person working is radically increasing um so first question when I started asking myself is well how did that happen there's something really critical it was a break around 1971 right around that period where people seem to reverse course or where there was this great expectation of the disappearance of work which was then handled by simply relocating work and doing it on a lower lower tech machines now wouldn't okay I should frame this now we don't know whether robot factories were in fact possible right we don't know whether they could have actually invented anti-gravity issues or any of these technologies so when you're dealing with something that might have happened um you kind of have to make a leap and the usual way people have interpreted this phenomena is simply to say well you know people had an unrealistic idea of what happened it must have been unrealistic it didn't happen right um of what would happen so so why did they get it into their heads that all of this stuff was going to happen and you can talk about the US and the Soviet Union as frontier society is in the space is the final frontier of competition between superpowers introducing this notion of you know both sides trying to conquer the future to gain advantage over the other um and sure there's always myths at play but that really doesn't say one thing or another about whether it was actually true whether any of these technologies could have existed or not so I'm going to take a leap and say well you know just as science fiction technologies in 1900 actually did materialize at least some of the science fiction technologies that people were expecting the sixties 50s and 60s actually could have materialized and for some reason didn't well why is that now if you look at it from that point of view you find something really interesting there actually were debates really very explicit debates right around that period about whether technological change was a good thing or not and you know the obvious person to name here is Alvin Toffler history of whom is quite fascinating and one of the fascinating things to me about Alvin Toffler is that he's always he's the famous futurologist he made up the phrase futurology um before that he was on most famous for having done a playboy interview of Ayn Rand um which shows something about which is quite interesting which is that he's not a radical thinker at all um and he's somehow remembered as such if you look at people's book collections the same sort of people have Timothy Leary and Alvin Toffler next to each other as if they're kind of the same thing but in fact in a way they're opposites um he's a person who is essentially reading this incredibly reactionary book arguing that these all social problems are caused by the increasing pace of technological change and he had this idea that sellers are to thrust that every not only is change happening on continually it's happening faster and faster so if you look at the sort of number of academic articles that are published it doubles every I don't know 25 years I think since the 1650 everything's growing at the sort of exponential rate um I could say the same thing of the speed at which um people could travel for much of human history remained about the same and then 19th century starts growing very rapidly and then it really does seem to increase geometrically to the point where if I'm not mistaken at toppers time was roughly 25,000 miles per hour which was reached by the crew of Apollo 10 in 1969 just one year before Toffler wrote the book in 1970 so you know it seemed at that rate it was completely reasonable to assume that you know we'd be on in other galaxies you know in a century or two um the weird thing is that maximum was the maximum people have ever reached it stopped exactly at the time he wrote that book in fact not only the the top speed at which people can travel is not increased since the top speed at which people ordinary commercial flight that peaked I think in 71 with the Concorde and that one's gone backwards of course because we don't have the Concorde anymore so right around the time of Toffler the phenomena that he describes in a lot of dimensions as stops this exponential increase comes to an end and at exactly the moment where people like him and of course as we all know Toffler ends up firstly adopts the sort of earnest Mandal does a capitalist version of ernst mandals third way of argument and he becomes the guru to newt gingrich sort of um letting go is real political stripes but you know toddler was really saying well this stuff is scary because it has unpredictable social effects and you know what's really going on in the sixties all this unrest um he seems particularly suspicious of feminism so I guess subtext a lot of these futurologist so they don't quite want to admit he even though he wrote a lot of his stuff later with his wife he's pretty distinct consistently anti-feminist in his perspective and one of his big arguments in future shock because the entire idea of motherhood is going to go down the tubes um alright so you have these guys saying you know our most basic sacred things motherhood and apple pie are threatened by increasing technology another guy actually which people don't talk about nearly so much um is our people Gilder the George Gilder fascinating figure I become really interested in um who was he did a kind of theological version of supply-side economics he argued that monies of creating money through the Federal Reserve and giving it to entrepreneurs is actually a reproduction of the divine act of creating the world out of nothing and that it's by Pat Robertson referred to it as the first truly divine theory of money creation um and well these right-wing thinkers are more interesting than we know but anyway he was also a futurologist he but but you know he and Toffler were sort of I was also newt gingrich's other guru during the 90s um um they both had this idea that technology needs to be shifted away from the sort of old materialist base um the kind of thing with the celebration of the engines and machines and Marinette II stuff that Jameson was talking about towards technologies that are you know more less socially threatening um so they thought information technology medical technology they framed it in the logic of the marketplace this is more market but you know there's also military technology which was a big thing we shifted to around that time and it seems to me that what's really going on here is we make him a little late in the game the shift had already started happening in the 50s and 60s of the pace of technological change you see for much of the period in 19th century in the first half of the 20th century you really slows down radically people are noticing it because of all these things like the space program give people a sense that something very exciting is happening but well the moment we got to the moon before the Russians there seemed to be this sense of okay we don't have to do that anymore and it's right after that there's this huge shift of emphasis away from that kind of technology and towards precisely medical informations sort of things so I would like to make three arguments as sort of takes the form of a thesis antithesis and synthesis one is that there seems to be a profound shift since the 70s from investment and technologies associated with the possibility of alternative futures to technologies that furthered labor discipline and social control now as we can see these guys actually were thinking about it there and talking about sort of dangers of technological sort of uncontrolled technological development on the own they were seem to be very scared by the robot Factory stuff um and I think one argument you could make um somewhat surprisingly no mark says this elaborate argument that since value can only be extracted from human labor the change in the organic composition of capitalism mechanization is going to create a declining rate of profit I assume you all know the drill it seems to me that it's quite possible that Marx was right about this what he was wrong about was that capitalists would do it anyway and continue to mechanize it see you know a case could be made that starting in the late 60s people kind of figured this out on that increasing mechanization of industrial production was going to basically undo the possibilities of profit and it certainly explains what they did which was moved to much lower and labor-intensive forms of production elsewhere um at the same time these guys are thinking about the socially disruptive effects of technology and it's quite interesting to to think about the fact Gris well what would this have even happened earlier had it not been for the Cold War and of course it's really hard for us to remember that in the 1950s the Soviet Union was seen as this terrible technological threat um I mean remember that they had actually you know people who are making plans in the 50s still remembered the fact that in the 30s when America was in depression the Soviet Union was growing rather like China is now on the fact that in the 40s they produced all those giant tank armies um in the 50s they had the Sputnik up and so people actually felt that there was a genuine threat um this is why people is make that film the famous argument that the lunar landing was probably the greatest historical achievement of the Soviet Union since the US would never have done it otherwise but one of the things I find really interesting is we're also used to think the Soviet Union as these great bureaucrats the degree to which there was a sort of imaginative firm note that reached American consciousness to indirectly um because well these we think of these guys as great bureaucrats but they were great rats who dreamed like incredible dreams and they never stopped doing it most of those dreams turned out kind of disastrously um and a lot of them were idiotic and I like Stalin his famous 100-story giant tell us of the Soviets the 20-story statue of Lenin um you know a lot of them didn't get off the ground they remained on the drawing pad but they were kept coming up with them um one thing that really fascinated me is when he talked to Russians about this you know even at the end of the Soviet Union they had these mad schemes they had this idea of um spirulina you know seeding the oceans of edible seaweed to solve the world hunger problems and they the giant energy project which nobody talks about in this country where they're going to like shoot hundreds of solar powered satellites into outer space beam energy down to earth to solve the world energy problem that's why they built those big booster rockets that we're still using but um and it was all for that um so they always kept coming up with these crazy gigantic ideas huh and a lot of the Golden Age of science fiction will happen both in Soviet Union and the u.s. at the same time drawing on ideas a lot of which had never been developed in Russia over the years because one of the interesting things about this future I talked about is we all kind of know the technologies were supposed to get you know if you think about Star Trek there's tractor beams there's like doing a death ray as phasers is their version of it um there's force fields don't we all know what there's been cloaking devices there's a sort of panoply and any twelve-year-old sort of knows all the things that we're supposed to have 200 years from now just like any twelve-year-old knows how you kill a vampire right it's kind of amazing I remember seeing a vampire movie with a bunch of people from Eastern Europe and they're really trying to remember oh yes there's something about garlic you know and I realize it you know any eight-year-old child in America knows more about how you kill a vampire than people were actually from Transylvania completely thoroughly inculcated in this mythology and I wondered you know maybe the science fiction mythology we have is actually equally an Eastern European import at least to a certain degree um I don't think about like the Federation and Star Trek and this might be a great example of that I mean in a way what is the Federation it's like extremely military top-down but incredibly idealistic they have no apparent class divisions but at the same time they have no apparent representative democracy well you know it's a Soviet Union right I mean it's just like the good Soviet Union that actually works that we're all imagining as our future um so we have this lingering image of the future sort of Soviet future that we're no longer could acknowledge because nowadays we have to think of the Soviets only as these guys who like it didn't work nothing worked well I mean if nothing we work they want to be in there for 70 years so we just sort of erased that from our memory but it kind of comes in this lingering science-fiction forms um all right so the version is as soon as we got that out of the way these kind of grandiose bureaucrats making these crazy visions we could get back to the market so the line is that the technologies that did develop the medical staff the information stuff is more in line with market imperatives I think a better case could be made that you know there are things that are much more in line with driving victory you know first achieving victory in the Cold War and general victory in the class were there almost all technologies that have been used to further social control the information technology is which eruption freeing up from people for freeing people up from work of like you know we doubled the amount of work people have to do through various complicated ways whether it's you know work just-in-time production technologies to financialization all these things made possible by computers at the same time you know even though we've been pouring our research money into medicine still don't have a cure for cancer but we do have you know ritalin and so long done prozac and all these things which basically make people not go completely and say and despite the intense work regime they're now under um so this is one possibility um no in fact I would argue that neoliberal capitalism and one thing we can definitely say about it is it's the one form of capitalism that systematically prioritizes political imperatives over economic ones you know given a choice between courses of action it'll just make capitalism seem like the only possible economic system and one that actually would be a viable long-term economic system neoliberalism always goes for the first option um which leads us to this peculiar situation we're at today where the whole thing seems to be falling apart but the one victory they've achieved is that they brought us to a situation no one can imagine an alternative so you can do that and well this is the paranoid approach and it's not entirely untrue I think but it can't explain the total phenomena and this is my antithesis okay so you could say that all this technological advances that means no like they stopped doing big projects that actually in a way big science is even bigger than it was in the 50s and 60s but they've redirected it in completely different directions however all right if the reason why we don't have robots that can like you know take down my laundry is that um 95% of all robotics research is funneled through the Pentagon which is true well why don't we have clot to you know what do we have gigantic killer robot shooting death rays from their eyes because we don't have that either so even you know the technology is that we were supposed to come up with that they were funding and that they were pushing for you know by 2012 still don't exist so he explained that and I think the only way to explain that is durock recei and i don't have to do a short version of this but basically what happened was not a marketization of you know we have this image of Silicon Valley and there was a little of that but for the most part you know technological advance was still being channeled through big big money in various ways big science as they talk about what happened was there was a fusion of educational corporate and government bureaucracies in such a way that they had this idea that marketizing bureaucracies are introducing competitiveness meant everybody should spend most of their time selling each other things and I don't have time to UM do this in detail but I think most of us who have any experience of academic life you know know what's been going on um I remember thinking about this with academic publishers because you end up having to do everything yourself right or everything that isn't done yourself is outsourced yeah what do these guys actually do with their time I mean they seem to do something um they seem to be busy all the time but they don't actually edit the book they don't like make the pictures they don't do the indexing design the cover what do they do and you know what they do is they sit around in offices and try to sell each other things you know they have meetings they sell proposals and they go to you know conferences and try to sell things they're you know all they do is try to sell things to other academics um and this is increasingly true of everyone I mean it's true in like what I do which is social theory right arm we're all we do is apply for grants and assess things and assess each other and write letters of recommendation there's this massive outpouring of paperwork which takes up more and more of your time there's other things there's a privatization of research results that we could go into great detail but the interesting thing is that you don't I think Americans don't like to confront the fact that you know we are an intensely bureaucratic society and in particular the form of capitalism that we have embraced is a peculiarly bureaucratic form I mean Giovanni Arrighi made this point to great effect and that you know the corporation was invented at were in colonialism things like the East India Company the British actually got rid of that after the South Sea Bubble they were very suspicious of corporations and appeared in the industrial revolution the 19th century the period is a really greatest technological advance in change were not periods of large corporations there are periods of very small family firms combined with high finance and you know much of the first half of the 20th century was a battle between America and Germany to see which would replace the British Empire as a sort of new hegemon but both of them were embraced very bureaucratic forms of capitalism in contrast to the British form on the corporation really comes out of both um and corporation is you know transclude bureaucratic organization the first thing that Americans do when they take over is create a global bureaucracy of the UN the Bretton Woods institutions and so forth um now that you're awkward Trece and that's the moment where technological change really slows down and if you look at like you know we're did a lot of these discoveries actually come from in the UK no they didn't come from large institutions a lot of them came from things like rural Vickers you know there is a service Centrex of society they like put them somewhere where they only had to do something once a week and they would like study the insect life or you know work on their strange theories of whatever it might be and you know 90% of them were completely crazy but you know 10% that's where the patents came out of that's where discoveries largely and realize there's a famous some astrophysicist named Jonathan Capps wrote an essay called don't become a scientist where he sort of described what happens nowadays you have to spend much of your time being someone's flunky the but even once one isn't he says you know you're going to spend your time writing proposals rather than doing research and because your proposals are judged by your competitors you cannot follow your curiosity you have to spend your time and efforts and talents anticipating and deflecting criticism rather than solving important scientific problems this proverbial that original ideas are the kiss of death for a proposal is they have not yet been proved to work so I think like you know there you go that's why we don't have flying cars I mean yeah that's it he just told you uh uh um you know is if you want to actually you know come up with unexpected breakthrough what do you do you you get like a bunch of creative people you give them whatever they want whatever resources they need and you leave them alone for a while and you come back and you know most of them are going to come up with anything but you know one or two are going to come up with something you never would have imagined if you want to make absolutely sure that innovative breakthroughs and never happen what you do is you say okay none of you guys get any resources at all unless you spend most of your time competing with one another to convince me that you already know what you're going to discover so there we go I think that problem solved I could go into greater detail but alright but there's a synthesis here um in fact we live in this profoundly bureaucratic society and we don't notice it largely because bureaucratic practices and requirements have become so all pervasive we don't even see them anymore we can't imagine doing things any other way and computers you know played a key role in this um John Stuart Mill has this famous line of course that you know never has a labor-saving device been invented that actually saves labor um it always seems to increase it and during the period where they came up well the Industrial technologic you know labor-saving devices everybody seemed to be turned into an industrial labor at least part of the time now that we've invented computers to like create the paperless office and get rid of paperwork we all do paperwork all the time every day somehow works that way um but I keep thinking of those crazy Soviet projects as the last gasp of what is a rapidly disappearing mode of Technology on which we we were forgetting ever existed um and I would call those poetic technologies you know a Lewis Mumford made the famous argument that most machines are really based well the very first machines were made of people that bureaucratic rational techniques you know for example these production line approaches to build the pyramids um and that later you know they had almost no technology I mean the lever or they'd have a wheel a couple things police maybe um and that you know complex technology takes social relations bureaucratic social relations and simply internalizes them physically uh so you have this sort of rational bureaucratic approach post a physical reality through mechanics and to people and for most of you in history it's basically used to realize somebody's imaginative crazy dream this is what I call it poetic technologies and they might be horrible dreams they usually are actually um somebody's make a local concept of pyramids building railroads across continents going to the moon whatever it might be um so that's what I would call a poetic technology when you use sort of rational bureaucratic approaches to realize some imaginative vision um and um you know the Soviet like let's launch hundreds and hundreds of solar powered satellites and being the energy down you know kind of thing was like the sort of last gasp of the technologic technologies their defeat has led to the dominance of a complete inversion what we now have are what I would call up your Craddock technologies and the Internet is a perfect example but everybody says well we still have creativity we have the Internet it's very creative um you know we still have technological unleashing of people's dreams but yeah but what's what is it actually to do basically you know what happens is we have people using all sorts of creative energies and insights and innovation to create ever better platforms to fill out forms simply imagination now exist in the service of your honor is a bureaucracy which thus encompasses every aspect of our lives I mean even right before I you know gave this talk I got these know three different pieces of paper I have to sign and fill out in order to get paid now I'm guessing that when Max Weber gave talks you know in Heidelberg in 1910 you know he didn't actually have to fill out three forms and they were Germans and they were supposed to be the worst right he's like somehow we this has happened to us and we don't even notice it anymore you know we spend more time filling out forms than any population in human history and we're seeing somewhere that the average American spends six months of their life waiting for the light to change I have function of our lives we spend doing paperwork I can't even imagine it's like a really substantial chunk all right so the question is what happens to the future under this peculiar circumstance arm be caught and and you know whereby we've got the situation where we're used to this idea of technology sort of increasing but it's basically hit a wall and we can't admit to this fact and what are the cultural consequences and I think you know we've been spinning around and around with us in a million different ways but we just don't know what to do with the future anymore my friend pifo Franco befo Berardi wrote a book the end of the future talking of moves written on the hundredth anniversary of Marinette e's futurist manifesto and he wrote a post futurist manifesto and um basically say okay the future is gone we have to come up with something else now but in a way that that very dilemma um reveal something that we can't actually get over it because you know we still have this idea being post something we're just running out of things to be post of um no okay we got rid of modernist and we got rid of structuralism they're just going to try to come up with everything so it's always like I've got a new idea I've got a new idea about why new ideas don't really happen anymore um it was an illustrative cycle but in it shows that there is a certain way that that we can't get out of the rod and it strikes me that happens on two different levels it happens in capitalism you know there was a moment in the 90s when you know the fall of the Soviet bloc that capitalism thought well we can just take up that sort of revolutionary redemptive huge future and just say we're doing it there's like this very brief moment that New York Times was saying a shape of are over alive now he'd be in the old liberal hope he was just out of sheer revolutionary fervor because we're revolutionizing everything and they sort of just tried to transpose it Andrea Dopp the sort of utopian revolutionary rhetoric on the capital side it completely failed um it fell apart in just a few years it doesn't work that way um yet and the capitalists are stuck I think because they can't really imagine a redemptive capitalists future um but they also can't imagine things staying the same because our basic rhetoric of I we imagine ourselves his base is is so deeply based an idea of a redemptive future we can't really tell our children that you know I don't the fact that slavery ended and women got the vote or it was just hysterical coincidence of no greater significance and we're not actually heading anywhere we're not more enlightened than we ever were we've got this notion of this there has to be some kind of historical thrust and I give that it's somehow tied to technological thrust but we just don't know we don't have an excuse for it anymore we just don't know anything else so you know from probably 20th century who had generation after generation being brought up with this idea you know at first world war one then in a world were to rise of fascism the Holocaust um nuclear palms whatever it might be you know disillusioning them but then they teach the same thing to their kids so it just happens over and over again um and in particular capitalism seems to have a dilemma because capitalism can't imagine its own eternity arm in a way like there was that fusion between the notion of a redemptive future and the fall of capitalism which hardly served both purposes and having lost it they they really don't know what to do I'll tell you what I mean by this there seems to be a strange pattern that for most of the history of capitalism capitalists can't imagine the system they're in really being along around more than a few generations of the future no for the night most of the 19th century and people documented this I mean almost all that even the avatars of capitalism say well it's really a great system but unfortunately it's doomed and usually the reason is revolution I used to live in Chicago and there's this incredibly beautiful Street on northern Chicago where you have all these 19th century mansions and someone explained to me that the reason why is it's on the road to the nearest army base is all of the late 19th century capitalists like we're so convinced that the revolution was going to happen any week and they'd all be hanging from trees so these are relocated to the place where they can most easily evacuate um so capitalist lived with this idea that it was really not going to last for that long for much of the history of capitalism the moment you get to the point where it's no longer plausible basically after World War two kind of hard for these people to imagine they're all going to get killed or that the system is going to come to an end through some sort of grandiose revolution what do we get nuclear war so everybody thinks we're all going to die in a generation or two anyway on the moment nuclear war no longer seems plausible global warming um so there's at least something about to destroy us all and it has been the case you know capitalism capitalists have never really believed this system is going to be around forever I'm not saying that nuclear war and global warming are real you know um either they have this idea they're going to be taken out by something redemptive or some catastrophe it's going to destroy the world entirely but I have always wondered why that is and I the most plausible reason I came up with has to do of speculation that you know essentially money nowadays is credit um I think people argue that 98 percent of dollars don't correspond to any economic value that exists now but correspond to an economic value people imagine will exist in the future um which actually makes the whole idea of neoliberalism where you're supposed to provide credit for everybody so everybody participates in the capitalist game arms the way of democratizing the system you know becomes a strange system where freedom means being able to have own a piece of your own sort of permanent exploitation but penis has it may you know the thing doesn't work if you have a universal horizon I mean because if most money is speculative you know what's to stop you from speculating infinitely you know armed yeah if it's going to be 500 years so people were using that kind of rhetoric you know there was a brief period right again after the fall of the Soviet Union during the revolutionary fervor capitalism is great capitalism is the new dynamic energy you know they people are starting to say things like Oh capitalism has been around for 5000 years and it's going to be around for 5000 years more um but in fact capitalists can't really think that it's a useful thing to think for ideological purposes but you know if you have that horizon what's to start people from speculating infinitely and destroying the system which is of course exactly what happened right during that period you get the birth of the bubble economy during this period of capitalist triumphalism you know you get so much credit money the whole thing collapses so capitalism is get stuck it with their future they can't imagine a future at all um however you know the one thing they've been incredibly good at is preemptively heading off any sense of any other redemptive future i mean so i say neoliberalism is really about prioritizing destroying any possibility of dreaming for of a radically different system um even at the expense of destroying the system itself and I could go into various reasons why I think that's what happened but I don't think this is the place to um the point is that it did um so what's happened to the future we can't imagine things without it and as good lovey Soros said in the introduction um we you know we can't live without the future because it's only from the perspective of the future that we have any sense of making sense of the present um that kind of redemptive future never goes away certainly we have nothing else to teach our children so it becomes alternative dimension and to some degree now is the redemptive future to some degree everybody knows that's not the case some degree exists in this kind of virtual forum which is always thinking with a possibility of becoming real and we kind of reach it sort of like the Australian dream time it's something that you know the dream time was something which was both the past that once did exist long ago and still exists simultaneously we can enter into it in dreams we seem to have made the future into the same thing it exists as another dimension of the present which we can enter sometimes on the internet for example and you know both existed another time and as another dimension of the present it in a kind of permanent suspension now question is are we stuck this way permanently strikes me that no I think that neoliberalism had you know oddly enough you know when Mandel wrote his book he was really torn the phrase late capitalism which sort of for many years seemed more and more of a joke you know I hold advisory partial saw ones used to say it seems to be dying more and more beautiful death every year but no suddenly that's turned around and that we're in this peculiar situation where we are so choked by bureaucracy that we don't actually see how the possibility of turning lapse or virtual reality which we surround ourselves with every moment into reality would actually work bottom I mean one of the fascinating things I have this conversation all the time uh you know being both an anarchist and an anthropologist with people who are skeptical about the idea of radically transforming modern society they always justify it technologically actually everybody turns into a technological determinist when you throw radical ideas at them and so you know as an anthropologist I know perfectly well that like there's an endless variety of economic and political forms that have existed over human history of very radically different one so when you pointing that out to people people say oh yeah but I'm talking about something that actually worked and so there's this at work does that work on said yeah yeah yeah but like you know those guys are primitives you know I mean like we're talking about modern technological society I'm never going to work there you know to which of course the reply is that wait a minute I thought that technology was supposed to increase our possibilities you're saying that like you know primitive people have lots of social and economic possibilities and now that we have like you know machines we don't anymore which is hard enough as an argument but what in order to really maintain that argument that you know nothing else is possible you have to argue not only that the particular current technology that we have now could never allow for anything but one social system that would actually work but any possible future technology I think about that what's the chance of that that's completely absurd so in a way you know in order to create this sort of suspension where we want to think about a future but we have to shuffle it away to somewhere to the corner you have to kill off the possibility you have to convince people that there is technological breakthroughs going on they kill off the possibility of really fundamental technological breakthroughs going on and I think that's what's bureaucracy has managed to achieve the idea that's doing it doing so forever seems almost completely unlikely and impossible um I mean maybe we at worst we can like uh stifle things here in the US but things are going to happen elsewhere sooner or later and the whole thing is going to come tumbling down so I think a future will appear it's just not going to appear from what we thought it was going to all right well I will end at that point quote-unquote better technology that capitalism would be annihilated I mean you're like saying these two different things I was a little um what point did you get in you were talking about Star Trek oh okay when I already what I was talking about like in the late 60s um everyone was expecting the creation of robot factories um and like all the radical theorists of the timer's ago the machines are going to start doing all the work in about two or three years now and it seems like a lot of people who actually were capitalists started taking this kind of thing seriously and freaking out about what was going to happen um once like traditional manual labor disappears I mean whether it sorry but just like what about like a Foxconn saying like oh we're going to fix the problem with all these suicides by laying off like thousands of people and replacing them with robots and so then you have all these people who are not working what about it yeah wouldn't working robots the robots are happening and they are in they're not I mean like the fact is that the amount of actual labor arm arrow and the technological labor on which the technological labor on which it is done is in a lot of ways ranked I mean there are a few areas where you know there's robotics beyond being applied but even one of the fascinating things is is that the shift away from high tech on production when people move overseas is actually cumulatively means that production is actually being done on the whole I'm going to never lower level I mean least according to a lot of estimations and certainly that was true around that period yeah well nobody knew I mean and one can't predict I mean obviously I can't come up with a grandiose scenario of exactly what would have happened because we don't know which of those technologies would have happened what we do know is that you know you can demonstrate exactly the point at which people started freaking out of the possibility so I talked about Alvin Toffler - here must not actually um I can't repeat the whole I can't rather than what what had happened or what could have happened he we talked possibly about organizing the possibilities of Technology not through bureaucracy but food kind of General Assemblies that have emerged through OWS and previously in protests that you've been involved with some of the ones that you like to build in direct action ography how for example we could stop moving away from the existence or not a robot action and and kind of self-governing within spaces like SVA where we find ourselves like surrounded by a kind of environment we don't recognize since we haven't built towards it you said about you know being handed free forms yourself and I recently through the top of another academic space and tech broke down and I was the one who had to manage it myself the same way that you're saying like there's more labor passed on to each of us and so I guess that's just a very winding question about why we're speaking in a QA right now which is a you know a very pretty warm or you know when we're talking about anarchist organizing in some way - well I wasn't but I do usually I didn't know they could do that now if you want me to um yeah well I mean it's very interesting I that there's a fascinating relation of anarchism in particular with technology you know on both sides you've got people like Kropotkin representing us or actually very Pro technology side um you know who has a direct answer to the robot laundromat problem you know um when people say why are there dirty jobs or who do the dirty jobs you know in a egalitarian society using everybody has to be old miner you know was crippled Coons answers like well if everybody had to do with coal mining robots would be invented immediately um so you know the only reason we don't have these technologies is because rich people don't really need them and poor people because poor people exist you know it's sort of parallel to the argument that you know where they invented they invented the steam engine and made Alexandria and nobody ever employed it during the Roman Empire because why bother if you have slaves um so there is the argument that that um you know certain types of technology or will only be developed um if you have an egalitarian society I think in a larger sense on one thing about OWS on this fact that we're you know so subsumed with bureaucracy is a token of the sort of interlace initial capital the fact that profits are coming more and more from the financial sector and not from manufacturing means that they're deeply embedded in government and bureaucracy ends up using everything I mean the reason I have to fill out all these forms is because otherwise I can't get paid and taxed and so forth and so on um and and you know one thing that I think is a real problem we have the invisibility of bureaucracy creates a situation whereby we don't discuss it as an issue and in particular the Left doesn't I mean the right does I mean the right has a critique of bureaucracy it's a really stupid critique of bureaucracy but they've got one and the left doesn't really have one at all and I think that gives the right an enormous advantage in a lot of ways and one thing that I think that in a sort of general assembly this idea vault is radically all creating radically alternative spaces is it provides like the basis for actually coming up with one now in terms of like what kind of technological change what come out of that in the long term I think it's significant that people are at least fantasizing more and more about the imminent development of decentralized technologies again um 3d printing this great example you know all white friends in Africa are getting very excited you know about the idea that we're going to actually you know people are going to start being able to make you know electric cars on garage everybody will you know all you need is a printer um in raw materials which people already have there um so I don't know if it's true I have no idea here mixed things about the actual plausibility of this happening but that idea of these radically decentralized forms of actual production rather than just imaging um happening to emerge right now strike me as telling in a certain way uh I guess I inverted talked I just wanted to point out the argument which is that it seems to me that sci-fi which isn't sometimes like the image of the future is itself changing and mm-hmm I'm an analysis of like what has happened in the sci-fi of turn-of-the-century 50s you know is going to miss the mark because as things change sci-fi itself changes and so thankful absolutely is just to be with James and um it seems to me that I've always thought that essentially considered divided two dozen sort of progress I find this is sort of like ideological rupture sci-fi where the game is sort of like oh what's totally different you know the millah deck the transport or thing and a lot of the criticisms that you made about sci-fi or bureaucracy applied to technology is that we haven't got these things yet right on why don't we have flying cars it and I posit III think part of the thing is that these things are hard sci-fi is hard but if not it's not that like cipher it's hard it's hard it's sci-fi because it is hard that is to say like hardness constitutes what sci-fi is um and so you can't you can you can't say why don't we have this thing that is really really hard because you know it is hard for a reason it it's not for a reason the other point is that like um as sci-fi changes the things that old sci-fi wanted to old Qusay if I want it is sort of like a spatial kind of change like why can't we teleport why can't we fly you know whereas the stuff that sort of new sci-fi does and you can sort of see this if you read like will let me give some to work from your oh man swift man the new kind of sci-fi is in the realm of sort of ideological organizational change right that doesn't manifest itself in the same spatial world but something happens in the realm of how you think or how you organize yourself which is a segue to the other question that is a difference you know we may not have flying cars but we have iPhones and I think part of the shift that happened d2 way more interesting than flying cars I completely disagree with you I absolutely utterly disagree I think whether making up these like utterly stupid toys that like you know as somehow compensation I just like don't buy that at all pass change spatial to organization or whatnot how is this change and I think well that's true yeah I mean but it's true on two levels I mean it depends on what level of sci-fi - um it is I mean Syfy was always a zone of social experiment I mean if you look at the 50 stuff that was true there wasn't as much the dystopian stuff yet but I don't think the change has been profound as people say and I think it's always you know the idea of like massive technological change of massive social change being linked was always the case and I'm one of the things I was arguing is that's what freaked people out um in terms of and near saying it's hard well yeah but that's why I started by saying that there were times in human history where this you know precisely the things they were fantasizing about did come true so what you have to ask is what changed you know why is it in first half of the 20th century the relation between what people imagine imagine futures and you know what was realized and the second half just completely faltered and you could do you know come to two conclusions for some reason they were met just more realistic in their guesses in 1900 than they were in 1955 you know um or you could say actually something happened um and there is evidence that something happened you could see these people sort of freaking out about the social possibilities and and they were and again on that that spatial organizational and uh thing was exactly what they're talking about if you look at you know what people like Toffler and Gilda are worrying about when they're talking about you know when they're trying to make up futurology and saying we need to control the pace of technological change so it doesn't disrupt our society that's it you know they're worrying about the family structure they're worrying about organizational structures and they're saying you know like these things are linked one is going to destroy the other we have to put a stop to this and so what's so fascinating is that that you don't tell the story that way but you know it we sort of reimagined a lot of these guys as if they're really into the future but they're not and and they're worrying about it specifically for social reasons so I don't think you're talking about sci-fi or sometime we know what I imagine is that you're talking about this really geeky guy in NASA and nineteen fifty sixty something father packed up the truck in South Jersey because committing to listening to the War of the Worlds and saying wow we can really make that happen that's really cool so you're talking about having an imagination about the future and then having the means to make that happen okay I also don't really people are brought up I mean it was just commonplace assumption that like certain technologies were going to exist and the thing is that kids and still know those technologies they they just see them as like you know like Narnia or middle-earth I just want to say that has a kind of reinforcement of the idea of imagination hmm and and then say in 1989 when the wall came down it was very sad not because I cared about him but because the other left and the picture and I think one of the things that I haven't heard you talk about although I love everything you said is what we have been doing in the past 20 30 years which is like a mashup between super colliders and pure theory it has been internal which has been an internal inspection with things side of what exists so you know they're worried about the family but I probably scare them more than the iPhone so what happened there has been the whole underground of people who are simultaneously living in bureaucracy and who are working on the ground who are infiltrating those systems and doing a whole lot of work that has has to do with capitalism only because it's the only thing that that will allow us to survive it at the moment but we're we're looking inside in order to gain a new kind of imagination of what's possible and I don't really when you say you can be queer in the world wherever you go and not worry about being killed I would choose that instead of a flying car I don't have well sure I mean we're not learned near there my co-sponsor um I mean I didn't what was the question oh absolutely yeah no I mean and and you know like saying that we're the future becomes something that like becomes a matter of introspection rather than um you know this sort of expansive moment is it might be an interesting way to look at it I mean I think okay just give an example I'm you know I want to talk about General Assemblies and things like that if we look at the history of that in a way there is an enormous amount of political progress it's made within social movements that you know I mean if you know I talk to people like Starhawk who's like a among other things if I'm in a science fiction writer but you know she says like you know is amazing to see since the 70s just how far people have gotten with this direct democracy stuff which like people were really clumsy at it first and and I know there's been this extraordinary sort of advance um I mean it's ironic because it's you know we're advancing towards something that you know when I went to Madagascar people knew how to do consensus process that's fine everybody grew but they've been doing that for a thousand euros it was just what you do things um and in a way you know our advances to get back there but nonetheless we're getting back there in a different way in a very self-conscious way that could be applied to other sorts of problems so I think that there has been all you know I actually think that the rhetoric it's not that we have destroyed any notion of progress um and I don't think we should abandon that um in fact we can't so that in the sort of official discourse it gets thrown into other dimensions um but I think actually on social and political levels there has been like things that I would describe is like profound progress going on under people's noses that then suddenly seem to burst out and people say where the hell does that come from no exactly is in a dream time yeah I had um a very brief question I guess starting with a very brief comment which is that like the Supreme Court you talking about corporations being persons you talked about capitalism as if it were a person so I know um capitalism doesn't this or it does this but actually I don't know that you can personify capitalism so that was my comment and my question is maybe so basic that it doesn't actually make any difference um which is the way in which you in this some kind of marvelous energetic formulation and folding of the of the non future into the non future what would seem to me to be not talked about is the notion of need or or the constraints of need and I'm just wondering how you think about the configuration of human need in relation to this sort of fantastical progressive technological projection that has either it's very unclear from your talk whether you think it's failed should fail will fail but but what what should fill the the relation we have as humans to technology but I would have to hear you talk a little bit about about the way you you think about or fold in notion it of necessity or new information to this bureaucratic world yeah alright the first of all the response to capitalism is I know I don't think of myself as this in capitalism's of subject um actually I sometimes asked whether I should even be using the word capitalism rather than capital I peace I don't think it's a total izing system I do think that they're capitalists and I do think that they meet and discuss things with each other more often than we realize I mean they have actually they have advertised meetings where they meet and discuss things with each other is not a secret um and we used to besiege them regularly Davos and um that's good spirit you know people sort of conspire all the time we can go and conspire the restaurant what do you think it's a problem with conspiracy theories isn't that people don't conspire it says like you know it's not let conspiracies are always all that effective and no conspiracy theorists have is that they think they actually always work most conspiracies are idiotic and don't work at all but and and you know I or if they do work they don't ultimately have the long term effects that people think um and I think so so I mean that's why I brought the examples of these concrete people that were actually making arguments I mean you know like Alvin Toffler you know wrote some bestsellers and he spent the rest of his life doing consulting and doing special seminars for you know CEOs and corporate leaders in one sort or another you know like that's what he does for the last thirty years so these guys do talk about this sort of thing I mean are they monolithic no I mean but there is a sort of center of gravity and you can trace out you know there seem to be an emerging consensus among those people running things at certain points that you know certain things were scary um now in terms of need I'm not quite sure what question is but I mean one thing that I think is that in terms of Technology the you know more egalitarian a society the more of the general direction of technological development is going to reflect actual needs I mean that was the Kropotkin idea you know like um we could eliminate you know a lot of the least Pleasant things that people have to do if everybody had to do them um I think that you know the more you have incredible divide the more technologies are going to be directed toward maintaining that divide which is exactly what we have and I mean um one of the fascinating things I find is is the degree of securitisation just in terms of like how much a laborer is sort of guard laborer I have a Kannamma friend who's been working on this and so estimates a 20 or 30 percent of all labor you know that's done in America is you know basically watching people from keeping them from rebelling in one way or another it's sort of similar to the people who argue that you know twenty ten or twenty percent of all work now is really compensation for the fact that people work too much so sit um you know all these jobs that wouldn't have to exist except everybody's working too many hours you need all-night pizza delivery men and all the additional like medical and psychological costs of too much work you know I actually produce a lot of the work which people are doing so completely a vicious circle so this has nothing to do human need I've asked to do the need of maintaining a system of radical inequality which it turns out is really really expensive in terms of hours which is you know precisely how you have this crazy situation where you know we're not actually manufacturing sector shrinks and shrinks and strengths were importing more and more of what we consume yet somehow the actual amount of work that everybody does is increased pretty radically um and it's essentially gone into this top heavy security labor arm sort of compensatory labor for the effects of all that doing all that extra labor required by the security of labor and so forth and so on this becomes you know crazy machine and in a way in that way it's kind of not surprising that so many people have talked about the works machine and you get primitive as saying the entire thing just eats itself and you have to get rid of it um my answer to that is that well obviously aside from the obvious one of like I'm not really into the idea of killing off 99% of the Earth's population so we can all go back to being hunter-gatherers is is that you know that idea is also is based on into some sort of strange faith I would say that not only are current technologies creating this insane cumulative of work effect but that any technology that ever could exist will do that and that seems to me there's no reason to assume that it's all an effect of the kind of direction technological change takes when you have increasing gap between rich and poor yeah I wanted to first thank you very much for the talking for the work on the ground and helping to stimulate many many possibilities and people's imaginations and on the topic of a poetic imagination and imaginings I personally bring up let's not talk by Neal Stephenson recently where he talked about the responsibility of sci-fi writers and a group of them spinning off and making a very self conscious decision through the hieroglyph process to reinvent technolon ism no model costs no hackers and no hyperspace thank they so this is a little playful but to what extent do you blame the sci-fi authors for the dystopia that is a we've fallen and where did the Russians come up with a foot up but a little more seriously because you talked about Redemption I wanted to take up the question of effect especially in the context of optimism and I think if you looked across the planet you'd be hard-pressed to find a group secular or religious that is optimistic about the next hundred years for Humanity maybe I'll just end with are you optimistic when I am getting married um yeah and let's be inert us old dollars I mean I actually do I I'm an inveterate optimist I mean you know revolutionary kind of has to be an optimist but um but I put it this way uh I don't know I I'm quite optimistic about the death of capitalism at this point I just really think that you know yeah it's it really seen better days it's kind of analytic even like a lot of members of the ruling class and they talk to you privately they're kind of like okay it had a good run we're trying to figure out what the next thing is so we can take care of that you know get on top of that before it's too late I mean the rats are kind of leaving the sinking ship more than we actually know um not all of them there are true believers uh but but I mean you know in a way I'm actually more worried that the next thing might be even worse so I think this is exactly the moment like how could we have a stupider moment to tell people not to try to think of what a better system would be like which is of course the ideological line we're just being told constantly that it's just like we can't think outside that horizon um you know we are going to have another thing and if we don't come up with something better fast you know whatever they come up with will actually be worse um on the other hand I am an optimist and so far as I think that you know there's an endless possibilities and I think this is a great moment for a reinvention of utopianism the lesson I think we've learned about utopianism is not that utopianism is bad it's that you know when you just have one utopia it's bad no what we need is lots and lots of utopias um more the merrier and we're liberating it is a 19th century liberal meant free market guy and the word was appropriated by no the Social Democratic left in America so that the right-wing had to choose another one's they stole libertarian which originally an anarchist from the anarchists so and then attacked liberal so which is why this system we now have in America is called neoliberalism everywhere in America and everywhere in the world except America where the word makes no sense to people um and as a result on the other hand is telling that when you want to talk about neoliberalism in America the only words you're allowed to use you know you can talk about freedom free market free enterprise or free trade you know um you know you can only refer to it with propaganda words um yeah in terms of link I'm actually I think that one of the nice things about movements like the Occupy movement is it at least gives us the opportunity to change the language and call things by their proper names and I think across the board the language that we use is is so freighted that and it's true on even on the left like think about the term of human rights abuses I was thinking about this the other day you know um if you want to go off I can go off you know human rights abuses um you know it sounds like you know not a propaganda word of obviously objectionable thing nobody can be for human rights abuses but you know you think of the following sentence um it is sometimes necessary to support regimes of unsavory human rights records for you know to further our strategic interests or it is sometimes necessary to support regimes of practice rape torture and murder so as just further our strategic interests you know which is more convincing um and you know if you take a basic measure rape torture murder which is what actually talking about you know when they say human rights abuses and just apply that across the board world looks totally different until recently for example like you know the Somali pirates didn't actually rape torture murder anybody and they started some groups did now recently but you know for a long time that was the case whereas you know every government in the region does it all the time um you know so the good guys and the bad guys often get reversed and you know through that abusive language I'm Apollo in Oaxaca you know they'd never raped tortured or murdered anybody but they were the ones called violent whereas the Mexican government which did all three to them a lot um you know was somehow going to be the good guy so now that that refusal to use simple words to describe things as pernicious of Mex I think in America the one is bribery the the word that we're not allowed to use um you know basically what we've done is we've gotten rid of the corruption problem in America by making it legal um I mean it's true on every level I had a friend was applying for a visa they had like a little box you could check to like you know for $25 they'd expedite your visa so you should have to slip somebody in the slot and it's like here it is um and you know so every level corruption has basically been legalized in America so our entire political system is entirely based on bribery I mean you know senator is like that to spend like at least a third of their time sometimes two-thirds soliciting bribes basically and you know the people given the bribes and write the legislation which then course gives them the right to take even more money from people I mean that's basically what our economy is based on this huge system of circulating bribes and I mean in a way that's not so people are pointing out like when they're identifying Wall Street in the political control is political control is part of the problem so I think you know starting to use words like that would be very helpful historically airplanes and cars and washing machines and whatnot became fixtures of our life not only because there were people with political visions of future but also because they attracted capitalism which enabled what they tactic capital which enabled them to be produced on a massive level and distributed I certainly once in the not-too-distant past robotics was considered a field that would attract significant amounts of venture capital flying cars probably less so but I wonder if you could comment on the extent to which you think the failure to produce more political technologies reflects a failure or a breakdown of the system of allocating venture capital and to what extent you think it reflects a lot of poetical innovation well I mean in venture capital is acted countable do these things were deeply embedded in in government and and capital is always in bed with each other in very complicated ways I mean look at the auto industry for example um you know there's a famous line from Eisenhower what's good for General Motors is good for America and it's true that our auto industry is incredibly profitable at that time but it's also true that you know the top tax rate on corporations was 65 percent under Eisenhower and the I think top rate on individuals which is what CEOs of uhane was a ninety two percent at one point went down to 90 um so you know there was this however what of the government do it took that money and gave it to Robert Moses to build bridges and highways to like further the auto industry um and you know in the process gave lots of like new jobs and politicians could get all sorts of bribes and kickbacks out of it so money cycled around in all sorts of amazing ways which seemed like virtuous circles at the time which was what I think he was getting at you know nowadays like GM and so far as it makes profits at all it's entirely from the financial division which is of course why it went bust um in 2008 because it wasn't in making any money on the cars anyway at this point um I think 15% of this pie something like that of the profits you know handled by Wall Street the great you know center of venture capital are in manufacturing at all and even that's way overstated because they are counting GM's financial division as manufacturing so there's been a profound shift and you know um whether it is something about a declining rate of profit and manufacturing - mechanization or whether it's some other reason is any interesting question I was throwing out the possibility that Marx was right just because what he predicted sort of happened except for the part about you know capital is all competing anyway and mechanizing maybe it's something else I don't know but you know what we can observe is this move away from that interlocking of government and capital manufacturing capital in one form that we saw in the 50s for example arm and towards a system where essentially money creation is what it's all about our government grants me what they call it deregulation you know as if you're just allowing people to play the market but of course you know what you're not supposed to know is that when people make you a loan it's not like they add that money they make it up by lending it to you so what you know government is do is extending to more and more corporations the right to make up money um and that seems to be like where the profits are now coming out of the financing of this stuff rather than the making of the stuff um whether they say why that is is an interesting question but I think it has everything to do with northen Amin as I was talking about social but any other society I think all of them until just now I mean that's basically been the model you know um these poetic technologies have been all right so I started with Mumford you know making that great point about the pyramids were built by production line techniques with no machinery well so the social technologies come first and gradually the industrial mechanical technologies often are inspired by what people are doing in coordination with one another um we thought was his argument and I think that's generally been the rule of any sort of large any area where you have what we would now call capital large concentrations of organized workforce and resources directed towards a birthday some-some particular goal there's a cathedral pillow thing I mean Keynes called a pyramid building arm that idea of channeling the surplus into something magnificent um has always cropped up over and over and over again um I think you know the reverse thing is actually no I don't think it's going to last forever but it's like a very strange moment where there's an inversion of what has been the historically predominant pattern I just hope the Soviet Union is sort of ridiculous apotheosis of this I mean none of those projects actually worked but they just kept coming up with bigger and bigger ones and sort of marked the last possible stat you know that a brand historical trend that have been going on forever now maybe what we have to do is get back to a way of doing crazy visions on a smaller scale primary seems like I think with that I think we have to leave thanks

Channel: LondonReviewofGames

Views: 99,253

Keywords: DavidGraeber, London Review of Games

Id: -QgSJkk1tng

Length: 86min 7sec (5167 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 27 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/verbalmachine]

Nice post. David Graeber is pretty awesome.

[u/2314]

I hadn't heard or seen of this guy before. This is what I come to reddit for .. thank you.

[u/[deleted]]

An interesting follow-up lecture for contrast:

• Eric Drexler's talk at Oxford University: Physical Law and the Future of Nanotechnology

Which proposes a diametrically opposed view, that we are in a local minima creating the tools to create the tools to launch into a totally new era of production which could burst forth and transform our reality - like Athena fully formed and armoured from Zeus' head - at almost any moment.

Both are extremely convincing - and likely true - and thus difficult to reconcile as happening simultaneously. One major difference being that Graeber takes explicitly as his horizon 1900 - 2012 whereas Drexel starts his talk from about 1mil years ago. For that reason, I am inclined to think Drexler is 'more correct' than Graeber even though Graeber provides a more honed 'social critique' for this present moment as the 20th century bleeds out into 'the future' where we live.

Which, if you believe Drexler, will not be comprehensible based on past experience and thus will not conform to our science fiction dreams discussed by Graeber - they will be weirder - precisely what Graeber does not account for. Graeber does focus on the socio-political consequences of technological change as they evolved post 1960 and the 'deliberate' decision that were made about the directions they should go (i.e. towards greater social control).

I think it is the Kurzweilian line of investigation/argumentation that Graeber fails to account for which undermines his thesis; he is so 'radical' but not radical enough to keep up with actual scientific extrapolation.

Graeber, for example, mentions orbital solar power a huge, pie-in-the-sky ideas ('romantic technology') that has gone the way of the do-do, precisely at the time these ideas are a) now realistically feasible b) being seriously pursued. Graeber ridicules his own colleagues while trying to critique them away from his diagnosed failings.