David Graeber vs Peter Thiel: Where Did the Future Go

my name is John summers and editor of the the Baffler magazine which is sponsoring this discussion tonight but the question is very simple but also broad ranged what's the matter with America and what does technology have to do with it that's the question or perhaps our theme it breaks down something like this once upon a time rich societies like the United States believed in new technology as the Gateway to the true and only heaven of progress and prognostication was like everything else a growth field tonight Peter Thiel and David Graeber come together to discourse on the surprising disappointments and ironies surrounding the course of our new technology and to spotlight the country's loss of faith in creating a new future fundamentally different from the present can anything new and different possibly come from the government and corporate bureaucracies with their stultifying organizational cultures what role have computers played in the long stagnation of our culture ken America survived the decline of vision among its leaders these are some of the questions that we'll touch on but since time is short let's get right to the biggest question of all why are we here what do a Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur and an anarchist anthropologist know about this stuff that the rest of us don't David Graeber [Applause] what happened to the second half of the 20th century that is to say if you're growing up and say 1900 and you're reading HT wells and Jules Verne and that kind of thing growing up at the turn of century and you're imagining what the world would be like 50 years later well you basically got it right you know I'm cute there were flying machines and submarines and rockets and talking boxes and you know TV radio so forth and so on some didn't get the time machine but a lot of the basic gamut of inventions they expected to happen did in fact have them now here's me growing up in the 60s um imagining oh my god I'm going to be 39 years old when it's the year 2000 I'm sort of imagining what the world is gonna be like and we all kind of knew what was gonna happen - there was a similar list of stuff and um there were going to be anti-gravity sleds and teleportation devices and Mars bases and robot androids that could like do chores for you and immortality drugs and you know there's a basic standard last and I don't think any of us expected we get all of that stuff within our own lives but I also get occurred to any of us that we won't get any of them and the thing that fascinated me is that I know that everybody who grew up them you know thought this stuff was gonna happen well if you were growing up at that time it wasn't just fantasy it was well authoritative voices you go to the planetarium read National Geographic watch those TV science shows all your elders were supposed to know about this stuff we're assuring you this is what was gonna happen that we actually believed that these things were going to happen has been wiped away as an embarrassment in our memory comes back to haunt us and other forms in order to break the taboo in a certain way I remember around 2000's another point where this really struck home um I was waiting for all the people to talk about what we expected the world in 2000 was gonna be like and how disappointed we were nobody said that everybody pretended to be really were living in this world of unprecedented technological wonder so okay the question became for me became why I don't think I have definitive answers but as I began researching it two things really jumped to the fore and one of them was the degree to which there was a self-conscious change of direction in investment research and development it was a kind of a right-winger a ruling class freakout was taking up more by the right but I think to some degree by the established left as well that can be documented people started saying oh my god what's gonna happen when robots replace workers it was a reaction to the unrest of the 60s or a lot of people Alvin Toffler really embodied this in a lot of his publications future shock but it was brewing for some time before people say you know all this unrest imagine what its gonna be like you know when the entire working class is replaced by robots are all gonna turn into hippies and dropouts and it's gonna be chaos in that ferment there's this idea that technological changes is happening too quickly all this space-age stuff is endangering the social order that you know the degree to which change happens happens quicker and quicker and quicker so that it seemed logical that since the sort of speed at which people could travel doubles every 7 years or so I don't remember what exactly the number was we should be an other galaxies quite soon in fact the speed at which people can travel stopped exactly the year he wrote that book and around that time there was indeed a shift in the direction of investment technological investment away from all that sort of space-age stuff towards investment essentially an information technology in medical technology and military technology and that's where all the money's been ever since the first thought you have is oh right if they've been pouring money into that stuff we still don't have a cure for cancer we still don't have the immortality drugs I mean we've got Ritalin and Prozac and all this stuff but you know it's useful for social control but the really good stuff we never got even there and even military technology you know I mean where is clot to you know where's the giant killer robot shooting death rays you know we know they've been working on that uh-huh but even that stuff they really haven't got you know they got these model airplanes that can blow people up whoopty-doo even they're you know the things they have been pouring the resources into we never got anywhere near what we thought we were gonna have why is that and the conclusion I finally came to is you could only understand this in terms of bureaucracy but not just the bureaucratization of research because it always been largely bureaucratized in fact Manhattan Project NASA were giant bureaucracies which are incredibly octave of innovation but it was a shift in the nature of bureaucracy that happened in the 70s and has accelerated ever since which is essentially a corporatization a certain type of corporatization of bureaucratize ation of research what happens in universities it happens in government it happens in corporations themselves which where the whole bureaucratic direction shifts away from an emphasis on production to more an orientation toward finance bureaucracies I mean whatever you want to say about them they were big and stifling in their own ways they actually could cultivate they're eccentric so I mean if you look at the kind of people were involved in the Manhattan Project also almost all weirdos of one kind or another even the people who set up NASA Jack Parsons the guy who set up the Jet Propulsion Laboratory actually made the rocket engines was actually a elamite follower of a leister Crowley he used to have ceremonial magic orgies in his house in the 50s eventually I was a lot of it apparently was organized by his wife's sister the orgies who then ran off with l ron Hubbard causing him to become so extreme he's kicked out of NASA and became a special effects guy who eventually blew himself up but you know these are the kind of people who set up NASA you know um you can imagine people like that being employed by government bureaucracies nowadays I find it hard to picture any functional society almost any society has ever existed has something to do with brilliant imaginative but extremely impractical people we don't know what to do with them anymore we just like they're all living in their mother's basement saying weird things on the internet and you can't tell what you're crazy and which actually I have something to contribute you know you used to put him in academia but now academia is all about self marketing being in academia I can see very easily what's happened um in my own discipline where now any kind of new thinking is really discouraged social theory you know basically what we're doing is we're writing these kind of endless annotations on French theory of the 1970s late 60s or maybe early 80s I call it the classic rock phenomenon they're still like doing the intellectual equivalent of listening look Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin and think they're cool but this kind of endless recycling is typical of disciplines which really seem to be opposed in principle to radically new paradigms and new thinking if you want to have maximized possibility of unexpected breakthrough is it's it's pretty obvious you know what the best policy is you get a bunch of creative people you give them the resources they need for a certain amount of time you maybe let them hang out with each other but basically you leave them alone and you know most of them are gonna end up not coming up with anything at all but a few of them will probably come up with something that'll even surprise themselves if you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs take those same people and then tell them they're not gonna get any resources at all unless they spend the majority of their time competing with one another to prove to you they already know what they're gonna create well that's the system we have and it's incredibly effective in stifling any possibility of innovation so I'll leave off at that and see what Peter has to say well there's there's a disturbing amount I actually agree with David on here I was careful to wear a suit tonight so that I wouldn't get confused with them but I'm actually a lot you know we have a tagline on our website at founders fund they promised us flying cars and all we got was 140 characters and it's sort of and I do think we've had this Tale of Two two tracks in technology in the last 40 years where there has been a very rapid progress and computers internet the world of the world of bets and there's been much more limited progress in the world of atoms flying cars transportation new forms of energy new medicines all kinds of other things that would be very transformative for our society so we draw a strong agreement that there's something about technology that has been relatively stagnant for for the last forty years and I also actually agree with David and this is harder to prove but that there's sort of a sense of contingency that this is this didn't have to be this way you know people people say that you know the most common explanation that given is that this was a law of nature sort of the the easiest things were discovered first and then it became harder to discover new things the low-hanging fruit was picked and I think the the truth is more like the the fruit was never low-hanging was always of intermediate height and there were various ways in which people reached for it and were able to to get it and somehow that's not happening as much anymore and so I think things could have been quite different and when I when I talked to various people in various tech and science areas I always do get the sense that a lot more could be done you know we declared war on cancer in 1970 we thought we're gonna win by the Bicentennial by 1976 you know and I think we could have made way more progress in the 44 years than we have made you know one out of three people at age 85 has dementia and we're not even thinking of declaring a war on Alzheimer's which is gonna sort of a indication of how much lower our expectations for the future have been dialed down why did this happen you know we could spend all evening debating that and then we could get a pizza and go in the park and spend a few more months debating at night I suspect we wouldn't actually figure out why this happened and I want I want to suggest that a more important question to ask is really what should be done now and you know one of the in the in the brochure David says it was an excerpt from his article where he said you know we're not going to get cities with domes on Mars until we need to change the entire economic system and this is sort of where I think we start to disagree a little bit I would say we I would say in order to get cities with on Mars with domes and to go to Mars we needed to start working on going to Mars and and so the you know one of my colleagues from from PayPal Elon in 2002 he thought we should go to Mars he started talking to various various rocket scientists various engineers about it he asked you know what is it feasible what would you actually do you know he he organized a company he gradually built it and you know there's so it's always off but but they are they're working on ongoing that they have t-shirts that say occupy Mars and and so I think I think they probably plagiarize that but there's there's that that's that's sort of what I want to sort of underscore is is the sense of how one goes about doing these things we can always sort of blame the bureaucracy we can blame all these super structures but I think there is a surprising amount where we can just start and doing something what does it mean to be an anarchist it's that you start acting as though you're ready free and that's actually a sentiment I I strongly agree with and I think it should mean not be just free to think and free to speak or free to break things but also free to build things and that we are free to start building the future today you know when we started PayPal I said we weren't going to hire any lawyers for the first year because I knew they were just going to tell us we weren't allowed to do this we just broke all the rules the system got built and then sort of a year later you ask for you ask you ask for yes for forgiveness you don't ask for permission and and I think something like that you know is is is sort of a template that that is working and in many of these cases the the reason I have this preference for small startups instead of last large mass movements is I think you have to convince a much smaller number of people given that we're in this culture where there's a failure of the imagination where we no longer you know have sort of a common way to talk about a wildly different future I think the way to get out of it is by convincing a small number of people that the future can look really different I sort of think that if we say that you should only develop these technologies if they're developed collectively by everybody simultaneously there is a weird way in which that becomes a reason not to do anything at all and I think that's that's sort of the the challenge that that that one has with you know with with these sort of with all these movements that that that have thought of changing our political system whether it's Occupy Wall Street or the Tea Party and you know I think a lot of the intuitions that things are broken that we're near of stagnation and sclerosis are right but but there was sort of a sense that we're not going to get to Mars by having endless debates and and I think that's and I think we will get to Mars by actually working on on getting to Mars and I think you know I think there is an urgency to solving these problems it's not it's a if you if you if you take something like climate change seriously or any of any of these sorts of issues and we need to be working on energy solutions today and and that's why I'm not I'm not willing to wait for some mass movement I'm gonna try to just convince a small number of people so we can get going right now I'll leave it at that thank you [Applause] Peter's suggestion that one could have or what should want a cultural revolution without a social revolution to accompany it is that a fair description of his ten minutes is 15 minutes well in a way what I thought was charming about the book is there is a call for a cultural revolution a reimagining but I think that you're quite right in again let's look at overlap first I think you're quite right in saying that you don't need to change people's minds first that a large rule no I would go further I'd say that you change people's minds by doing something I mean what we found in our efforts to direct democracy for example was that you know you're not going to be able to convince people that a democratic society would be possible you sit there and argue they you could argue for days you're not gonna get anywhere one reason for that is that people everyday experience is sort of organized in such a way as to convince them that it isn't I mean almost nobody has any experience sitting down with any large number of people and coming to a collective decision and in a gala Terry way and so you have to do it you just have to bring them into a situation where people do this sort of thing and suddenly you said oh you watch a thousand people make a decision together at a leadership structure and it kind of works and if you have the right process an organization going and suddenly people say wait a minute Wow I had always assumed that was impossible I don't really thought about it but but you know what other impossible things do it might actually be possible to your analysis in your book about startups being about the right size about sort of division of labor within them there's actually a lot of overlap we anarchists think about affinity groups you need to have a relatively small groups around the same size you need to have informal division of labor and which emphasizes complementarity I mean we're more into rotation and other techniques to make sure that like permanent leadership structures don't arise but but in most essentials it's it's it's quite similar and partly to because we actually have to do and that's the system that's tended to work over time I think that the real question has more for me has more to do the larger structure I mean is it possible would be in a larger structure that seems to me to be to some degree designed to make sure that either it doesn't or that the sort of thing happens with very limited degree and this is why the reasons why actually I think it's not something we could ignore entirely i think the shift that happened in the seventies towards within capitalism itself worked was away from profits largely coming from production or even commerce at all but through finance and you know finance in practice largely means other people's debts it means various ways of rent extraction and I like your analysis in the book I think I think this is quite right that a capitalism in the market are not the same saying that when you have pure market situations that does tend to stifle innovation and um it's not surely desirable thing that economists say you can't really have systematic profits under pure competition with the gut yeah I agree with that and that in a situation where you don't have rapid technological advance that you know the alternative monopolies will tend to be forms of rent extraction and what you're trying to do is to talk about forms of monopolies that wouldn't be forms of rent extraction because they're actually based on making the pie larger um so far so good the question that I have is really want to cause an effect um you know at the moment what we have is a large number of monopolies said are in the business of rent extraction more than anything else and you know there's certainly the most powerful corporations or financial institutions that's basically what they do well the question is you know is this overall culture of uh which of stagnation I mean which it really is the culture which in many ways is a direct assault on on the human imagination a product of those structures of power that those guys have created itself I mean I think it's been so many other threads here I'd say that I would say that you know there is like well I agree that you know the this the eccentric university professor is a species that is going extinct fast and and and we have sort of a we have a Russians law inside these universities at work where you know the bad currency is driving out the good and in effect where the people who are nimble in the art of writing for grants are displacing the idiosyncratic thinkers who are generally one suspects much less nimble at that sort of activity and then but then you know the the question and so yes there's a screwed up bureaucracy and then the question is always you know where should we be applying our energies and and I've been a big like yourself I've been a big critic of the university system but I I used to believe that the right way to do it was you know all sorts of lobbying for internal change so all these different things you should do and I I concluded that it would be much more effective just to encourage talented people to leave and that that that was actually the easier thing to do I spend a lot of time looking at it and it was one of the thought of you know starting a whole new university and doing everything right included I couldn't even do that I looked at people in the last hundred years people have generally had a bad history of trying to do this and and so I thought you know is actually better just to get people to leave and I and I think this is the the issue and I I'd say yes there are problems with all kinds of structures in our society they probably are causing some problems but it's it's it's not where I want to put the focus of what to what to change and and you know yes some of these structures exists they slow us down in different ways but we should we should just start acting as though we were already free and I think there are some things you absolutely can't do you know you probably can't get a tenured position at Yale and I couldn't get a tenured position at Yale but but there are lots of other things we can do and instead of sort of beating our head against brick walls we should try to go the go down the various paths that are that are actually still available again speaking from the perspective of anti-authoritarian movements is always a big debate you know to what degree can you work inside existing institutions to what degree do you just say the hell of it and and create things on the side or do what the greedy trying to create things on the side you know within the nooks and crannies were of the existing institutions where they're not looking because most of us aren't in possession of the billion or $2 you kind of have to do that the central question is what are most people going to do because and a reason I think most people don't understand this about Occupy Wall Street I mean it wasn't like the tea party an attempt to work through the political structure it was exactly the opposite we made a very determined decision quite early on that we were not going to run candidates we're not going to enter the political process because it was hopelessly corrupt I mean essentially it's a system of organized bribery a little more that there's a small percentage of the population that's essentially profiting off this system of extraction of rent extraction and they've set up this perfect circular system where they essentially legislate the laws bribed politicians to put them into place to allow them to extract more rents and pass off their cut to the politicians I mean to some degree it's all institutionalized when a large corporation is caught doing fraud they don't they don't even have to plead guilty they just are signed this Agreement saying okay sorry you got us we're not going to admit fault who'll give you money and the money's always less than they made on the fraud so basically the government's saying you know like it's okay as long as we get our cut look III don't I don't think there's not an open is quite that much intentionality and I have sort of both a less in the line and the more dysfunctional view of the system I think there's no conspiracy I think there's there's you know it's I I don't think there was a conspiracy to stop scientists from from actually working I think conspiracy implies as a secret cabal it's pretty public they sit around say how much are we gonna allocate for this can allocate for that I think I think the the place where we where I think we end up disagreeing when some level is is I always get the sense that what your solution always is a larger thing that somehow ultimately at the end of the day will require more structure you know more more bureaucracy of one sort or another and so and so you know it's we're living in a new advancement we're living in an advanced technological society and so direct democracy does not actually work as a way to think about things our site it's too complicated you can't vote on everything you know we have you know website system that you have in California is widely seen as not having worked terribly well yeah and we're and you probably the parts that work the best are actually the parts that are the least democratic they're sort of the like you know they're sort of specific government agencies where people are well trained on like securities law or some some esoteric area and it's not very accountable it's not very democratic but that's sort of what you have to do in a complex technological society and and and I and I think that that's that's what's always being underestimated either by Occupy Wall Street or the Tea Party our society is too complex for everyone to get to vote on everything right well I mean we're not actually for everybody Filipa site systems plebiscite systems tend to be actually very undemocratic in effect and and there's a reason why dictators for example I feel of plebiscites we're talking about very much more complicated fundamental structural reforms and how things happen which involved decentralization this is something that people don't mostly understand one of the things about anarchist models that makes them so effective is that you destroys everything you possibly can and put it down to individual let me concede that there are things about that I would like politically but I want to go back to the technology question why could you build could you build could you the Manhattan Project could you build could you could do Apollo you get someone to the moon in a radically decentralized chaotic system or do you need coordinating the centroid yes you do need coordination and planning frankly I don't think that that creating very large-scale but fundamentally democratic structures historically it's not hard I think it's really hard to create tiny structures that are democratic you know you can get very large structures that work that way and coordinate things what you don't get so much or egalitarian families you know small scale structures that's what's actually much much trickier I think that there's a lot of things that would have to be organized very very differently and I understand also that you want to do some things now and I also I want to emphasize here very strongly that I totally agree on that I I mean you know if you can come up with a mortality drug great go ahead do it dictator a small company but yeah yeah I know I mean I I'm totally totally rootin for you here if you yeah any sort of tech startup research project that was organized in this radically democratic way that that really worked you know I think I think the things that work are are shockingly hierarchical and in these things they they they because they require leadership they require coordination you know it's we should be free to join other ones and so it's good if they're small they don't encompass our whole society but but I really don't think you know a start-up is not it's never it's really far from a democracy people don't get to vote on things and they've been a lot of experiments with this in Silicon Valley people have tried to start companies where they've been completely transparent normally it breaks down when they're transparent on how much everybody gets paid it's like at about 50 people people start killing each other over over those sorts of things and certainly if you try to actually make it participatory on everything you end up with internal debate and you don't actually get anything done that's you know and I think I think a lot of people would actually like to build companies like that part of the problem as we grow up being told her in a democratic society none of us have any experience there's playing places the world where people have trained from the ground up on how to do this and it becomes much easier so I don't think it's absolutely impossible to create these things but I also think there's a problem I think both of us have is that it remains true that the government is the major source of most basic research I think at the moment I just looked it up actually before coming here it's a 56% of basic researchers government funding but only 16% is corporate the rest of it is universities and nonprofits so if you put the universities and nonprofits together well you know not profit oriented institutions other than government are still doing almost twice as much basic research even the corporations are at this point so it's the startup is is a nice model for certain things there are certain amazing things that have been done but I don't think we have to assume that's the only possible model for where the breakthroughs are going to come from because it hasn't you know I'm not I'm not saying it's the only way to do things I I'm very much in favor in part because I agree there's a lot that's broken in our society and so I think and so that's why I think I think the the models we have to we have to work harder on are ones that work on a very small scale and we don't need to convince as many people and we don't need to start with as big a structural change but yes I mean there are all sorts of things that I could imagine different ways they could they could work I know I cannot imagine a straightforward way of changing these these systems from within and very hard to see how they change without and that's why that's why you know it's like how do we get to Mars you know do we change the NASA administration funding thing really hard to do but maybe you can even start a a company and gradually gradually do doing something like that you know in this case the case of Mars it there's also us a question of determination I mean NASA did pretty well to get to the moon surprisingly quickly considering what they had at the time on something inherently faulty in the model it says there doesn't seem to be the political will and we have to ask why that is and I would probably have somewhat different but overlapping explanations of that all right I agree it would be great to have somebody working on these kind of breakthroughs and I totally applaud the fact that people are doing it it's also the case that I want to see a society where everybody can and and I often say that the one thing that's not a scarce resource in the world is imaginative people we have possible solutions to intractable problems there's probably nobody in the entire world that doesn't have some idea that we would never have thought of and we're both pretty smart guys and you know the problem is that the overwhelming majority of those people go around every day being told to shut up how do you want Lisa I mean that's my basic question and that's why I'm interested in these broader political questions because now if one could unleash that creativity really then I think a lot of the things we think of as Brahma before you know these these supposed dead ends of technological social thinking we've had no what would seem ridiculous I mean there's people out there could probably come up with cold fuse of there's people out there that could probably come up with anything you could imagine right now you know they're sitting around trying to pay off their father's debt on the rice plantation and you know spending all their time in a shoe factory and which is on low tech because they it's more profitable to run it that way um and that's that's what I'm concerned about this guy's in on the game well I you know I look I think I think there are all these structural things but I think people you know I do think there's always a sort of failure of the imagination I was I was on a super tract career I was a you know went to everything you know and was law school worked at a law firm in Manhattan for seven months and three days and and you know I mean I and then when I loved you know people down the hall and it was really weird psycho-social Hammacher on the outside everybody wanted to go in on the inside everybody wanted to leave and people down the hall told me that it was good to see that someone could escape from Alcatraz and it was you know actually all you had to do was go out the front door and and now you know you'll say well it's harder for all sorts of different reasons but actually no all you had to do was go out the front door and so I I do want to always push back a little bit on how how powerless you know people really are and you know I'm annoyed that people are not more creative that they're not doing more in all sorts of contexts but but I think there are you know I think there are actually a lot of ways to do things and that's and that's surely that's what we have to start since you're not going to start by by you know we're not going to start by changing of the the bureaucracy of NASA or Yale University or anything like that you do want to see immortality drugs as well what's really best in like crazy forever way in which any ways in which your respective positions are working against each other universe that you'd like to see I don't believe that these political institutions can be changed I don't think that's what what you do I to believe this a great deal you know if you hold a gun to my head and said you know what are your political views on things I'd say that I'm sort of libertarian and this is socially more liberal fiscally more conservative or something like that but but you know temperamentally I would describe myself much more as a political atheist I do not believe that the existing political orders divinely ordained or sacred or special and I don't believe there's any other order that could replace it that would deserve that sort of that's sort of deference and and and I I find myself just not believing in it hmm right I mean I which is why it's funny that we're seeing this is a debate because you know than part of the movement as basic premise was we are not going to work through the political system I mean one thing I find in some of this stuff I've been doing economically about money and different ways of thinking about money moving past this or dead end neoliberal discourse about currency is that the political class is just useless there's no point in talking to those guys they're there they're basically bought and sold they're totally locked into a certain logic whereby where whereas even the technocrats the guys are now running the system they know the thing that's broken and they've acted and and they've got actually put in place these policies these idiots come up with I mean they know they're based on entirely false premises there's a huge break right now between the Bank of England and the entire political class in England with Bank of England has said well actually you know it's not like there's really a lack of money you know money is created by making loans everything they say is wrong we admit that now that the the heterodox economists were right political Lasky's carry on as if this isn't the case so so yeah the political system itself is useless on the questions I mean I'll disagree with what the money part yeah I feel this great something sure you know we can have all sorts of debates about distribution or about things like this but I okay I actually do think that that there is such a thing as an economy that there is such a thing as scarcity even if there's not enough necessarily to go around and that therefore you have this very complicated way of allocating things and and even though it is true that we can in theory print infinite amounts of money that's not a way of that's not a way of solving the problem of scarcity and I think actually by by by shifting the problem to the level of money you're making the same kind of shift from atoms to bets that you questioned earlier on you know I think of money as the the perfect virtual good and and and but what it stands for are always real goods and and so when you print more money you don't actually change the underlying the underlying nature of the real goods and I think that's that's something that I'd be much more focused on the reason I think the technological stagnation is is a problem is because this problem of scarcity and I think we need to you know you know you have seven billion people in the world six billion people live in emerging market nations and if they're going to have living standards anything like the ones that people in the in the developed world enjoy you need all sorts of new technologies to enable that that to happen and and the realities that we have you know we have a we have a certain amount of scarcity you know economics was the science of how to economize you know in some ways and I think in some ways we shouldn't turn it into the science of how not to economize oh I'm not saying that the people should just print money I'm actually saying we should acknowledge how money actually works which is just not the way the politicians say this is this is a long conversation but I think that what we can say is that there are certain types of economic policy which would unleash popular creativity which is the other factor because money isn't just measuring the value of stuff it's also measuring valued human actions and it's also asked a promise of future creativity and and that's the thing what are the forms of money creation or economics in general that will do that again going back to the question of all those people with the ideas who basically are told to shut up all the time you know some people often criticize me for example for sometimes putting in a good word for basic income which is actually something that there are certain elements of the left hand I can support I think of it as it partly as an anti bureaucratic thing that actually reduced the size of government and not have all these bureaucrats looking over everybody's shoulder telling them like making them feel bad about themselves all the time if you simply gave people a basic income support it wouldn't mean that you're trusting them to decide what they how they want to contribute to society I mean ironically a lot of the social welfare policies what do you think of a stifling or awesome you know actually unleashed creativity in ways that we only know now that they're gone I live I live in England you know used to be since the sixties at least every five years there'd be some amazing new band or musical trend that would just sweep the world coming out of England and that's what kind of stopped since tony blair what happened you know everybody says the same thing they got rid of the double you know all those guys run unemployment you know they were squatting to this so they've got were to squander um so you know you used to be a be free housing and you like have a base it wouldn't be much but you have enough money that you could like get your friends together of a guitar and you know maybe one out of a thousand of them was John Lennon but that's enough you know and now John Lennon is like lifting boxes and some some department store as welfare conditionality so look an ever gonna hear the new the new trend so I just think that you know that techniques which is leave it up to people on the broad scale to innovate in their own ways would actually be much more effective in creating the conditions where all these things both of us want to see what happened and that's why I'm interested in in those broader questions because at the moment I think the system we have is very much about about tying people down I mean again the debt situation this is not something that just happened this happened because of very calculated decisions and you could see it very much again in the UK where they did a tuition reform where they said okay let's just raise tuition across the country and give everybody student loans and I mean it's completely self-conscious you know this is not just something that just happened somehow but the point of that is to make sure that people start thinking of education not as a sort of exploring whatever they think might be interested in deciding for themselves where they can put their creativity but rather you know do something which people want to hire them in the relative immediate future will definitely want now I think the student debt is a is a huge problem you know certainly I would ascribe a lot of the problem to the runaway cost structures universities have so it's so that's that's as much a problem as in America yeah the the the interest compounding and I I do think the you know I think the intention out there's not that much intentionality in the system it's just you know there was a just there was a policy they said okay let's create something done well I know I think it was there was there was a sense that there was some some degree of scarcity on on these things you always have you know there is this problem of scarcity that you know and this is why I think it's we shouldn't obscure that now you say there distributional questions and maybe you know other people should have paid for it or something but but that's why those larger questions I don't think they can be ignored and and I think the final thing I would say is that you can't really be a political agnostic in some sense it's understandable that one wants to work within the system that exists but you know insofar as one does not end self-consciously opposing that system in some way or you know calculating a way to at least act in a way that will not reinforce it one tends to act in ways that do reinforce it and actually often make the problem worse I mean you know what we have it seems to me since the seventies and then this course on earth this technological stagnation has been an increasing emphasis on the fusion of government power and financial power doing the system of rent extraction and again maybe nobody sat down and planned it although you know they certainly talk things out with each other the G and so forth there is a degree of self-conscious at least guidance of the direction of the whole thing but um I mean lobbyists are essentially conspiring that's what they do for a living they just do it publicly and officially and that has sort of locked in a structure which is inherently inimical to innovation and it's one can operate within that you know there and it's great that there are pockets of people within the system we're gonna try to turn it against itself but you're essentially pushing against a tide here well it's again I I again I you know it's a sort of cycling on this non-stop but it's I always keep going back to me this is not the most constructive thing to be to be working on I think the more constructive things are to figure out ways to do new things and this is why you know this is why I think you know even with all the excess hype and Silicon Valley that's that's a little bit off you know even with the ways in which I'd like innovation not just in bits but also in atoms and there is some sense in which the financial era is over that that that it sort of has hit a wall and it's you know it's and it's it's it's going to be this long deflationary period they got a huge bailout no 8:09 but but you know the bonuses are slowly getting cut back and the banks are slowly gonna get shrunken and delever I think at this point it has it has shifted it has shifted to Silicon Valley in a in a very powerful way and I think this is actually a very hopeful development because I think that I think this is people have actually figured out this is where you can make a difference is where you can actually this is where you can actually change things that's an interesting argument I mean well what's what's going on in terms of the larger numbers though I mean in terms of where the I think Rockets are coming from it's still largely in the financial sector I would argue I would argue it's it's you have to think all this is always about the future where absolutely think they will come from in the future where do people think careers will be made in the future where do they think they will have an opportunity to impact the world in the future and and there there is a way in which you know Google has really displaced Goldman Sachs in a you know and again you can say you don't like Google or something but but but it is there is a way in which we've had this this enormous shift to to Silicon Valley there are problems in Silicon Valley I think we're not doing enough I'm always of the you know but but I think it is it is the place that is most about trying to do new things that's true trying to that is most about trying to create new forms in our society and and so that is a very hope very hopeful trend I guess the question I mean and you wanted something adversarial so I'll throw this out I guess the question is got to be oh is Silicon Valley actually posing an alternative to that larger structure where you have a fusion of financial and for security but but but I think but but I would argue that that that's that's again this is my political atheism or maybe it's just I'm secretly working on behalf of the regime here or something like this but but that is but I think the I think the way that the way that you you know the thought is we're not going to change the structures we're not going to change those things and we will work on these on other things you know you get companies like Airbnb and you know sort of changing some of the urban regulations you know things like this do shift and you know the education system is gonna probably shift at some point with you know online courses and and and so a lot of these things look like they're too small initially but I do think they can they can grow into things that will really change our society and this is always you know this is always why as a as a libertarian I find myself working in technology rather than politics because in politics you have to you have to convince too many people and I can never convince enough people to agree with me it's too hard we'll see about that tonight is you said you're maybe secretly working for the regime but can you speak about volunteering you're working with CIA and the US Army right that's where I was actually sort of going with this is this one thing to say okay we're doing something else but you know we're not trying to challenge the structure but there's another thing sort of using those technologies to actively reinforce the very structure which is ultimately stifling courage I think there are I think there are all sorts of concrete problems that that we need to solve you know SpaceX is working with you know it works with the the US military to help get financing to launch satellites and and you know on the on the Palantir side I I do think that there is you know I do think were some very big buildings that were blown up here in New York City and and as a you know as a libertarian I don't think we should have had the response we did to those buildings blowing up but but you did you know all the mass movements all the consciousness raising in the world did not stop us from getting the Patriot Act you know the ACLU is always good at talking about civil rights once something bad happens you never get you know the protections go out the window right away and so I actually I actually do think that there's something to be said for trying to figure out some ways to just to stop another attack which will be used to curtail civil liberties a lot more a company like PayPal could not get started in a post Patriot Act world because we would have been accused of money laundering in 99 to 2000 and so I do think the the fact there was no technology to stop terrorism in 2001 is what is what has led to you know a far another realtor in world another reason is why that's my my understanding of it right I mean another reason why 2001 happened is because all the intelligence resources were being brought to bear disproportionately on people like me my friends rather than the guys who are actually going to blow something up you know if any Snowden has revealed anything about the NSA it is it is how little technology there is how incompetent it is so you know you've got an intelligence agency where someone is downloading all the files and it doesn't raise any suspicions whatsoever this is much more like the Keystone Cops than Big Brother and and so and so we've had a world where there's been not very much privacy but not very much security either and and I I think that and I think we could try to have more of both it's moving from Keystone Cops to we get we get Orwellian because of the Keystone Cops because they know they know they don't they're incompetent they have to always do more and more so so you just have to Hoover up all the data in the whole world because you have no idea what you're doing let's stop this portion of the program thank you very much thank you questions yeah I just wanted to ask both of you since you're in such great agreement to begin with I feel like what you're just the larger phenomenon you're describing is both the breakdown in creativity and the imagination but also a failure to commit basic resources to research and development and what you're describing historically actually you know I guess for you specifically David when you talk about you know how other reveries of the early 20th century gradually came to pass there's there's a very specific way that all came to pass and it has to do with forces that I don't think either of you like which our government and ideology and the Cold War these were far and away the drivers for you know the basic infrastructure of the computer revolution as you say military technology things that and but more than that things that actually succeed and that we use on a daily basis like interstate highway system the GI Bill map and education sort of seemed to work and all these forces were knitted together by an ideology and it's an ideology that had lots you know I you know and drawing attention to this I feel like John McCain or Bob Dole or something like you you ingrates you don't understand the sacrifices that were made but in fact there is there's something to that you're both I think have certain utopian affinities where you think devolve decentralized persuade smaller groups of people but you know it's it's a big economy it's a big society to get change that registers meaningfully there needs to be a shared commitment of resources and I don't it's hard for me to see from either of your visions that occurs I mean I always like the line that the the Apollo moon landing was the greatest historical achievement of Soviet Communism I mean they never would have done it if it hadn't been for the Russians I mean that's that's true and you know the Soviet Union was actually I'd only learned about this fairly recently at all so it's a crazy insane huge ideas they had to cancel it a collapse they were gonna shoot a hundreds of solar powered satellites into space to beam energy down to earth you know those guys actually didn't think Megan they came out of a tradition of thinking big and they did so in ways that were insane and disastrous but they also did so in you know ways that were kind of interesting most of them didn't work but nonetheless they had that impulse in the way there was us an imitation of that the moment the Soviet threat died they said okay oh hell with that stuff and you know sort of went went on to to to technologies of social control ironically enough but but nonetheless I think that the answer the question is I'm not actually saying that small anarchist affinity groups are the only you know organization that could possibly work I mean I don't believe in national purposes I don't really believe in Nations I don't think nation-states are a particularly good unit of organization for doing large projects but I'm not against large projects I mean some things like this space program is gonna have to be done in a really big scale by a bunch of people who are united by by a vision I mean what I look forward to is a social order where people are sufficiently guaranteed you know are sufficiently secure in their basic needs that they cannot have affiliate with each other around those things which they think are larger value you know and those things could be anything from [Music] the fact that they're like chess obsessives to like some religion to the fact that that they want to go to Mars I think there's a sufficient number of people on earth who would if given that like life security organize themselves together because they want to go to Mars and you know they could like wrangle enough resources to do it but I mean it's a principle of freedom but you have to guarantee that people aren't you know debt slaves and they aren't running around desperately trying to like survive before you're going to be you know they're going to be free to form those voluntary associations on that scale to do that kind of thing you know just again it's always this question how much is a structures how much is all these things in our society like I think it's like it's interesting questions been raised like what went wrong in the 70s since we both agree this is a decade when things seemed to break so I'll give a non structural explanation for went wrong what went wrong in the 1970s the u.s. ran out of oil so it's you know the early warning sign was in 1970 when the Texas Railroad Commission which was able to set global oil prices by giving quotas and how much oil people can ship on Texas railroads it was the OPEC of the 50s and 60s in 90 was 1971 it announced there was no quota anymore and then within two years you had an oil shock and then and then we had all kinds of crazy financial manipulations and and we had a series of oil shocks in the 70s and the sort of the basic the basic non structural explanation if I had to give a single causal one would be we haven't recovered from the oil shocks of the 70s and there was a way in which a cornucopia economy in which there were the most the one of the most fundamental resources namely energy was unlimited in the 50s and 60s all the sudden became limited and that that changed you know all these dynamics in in really powerful ways but taking the technology question I mean why didn't we come up with something else I mean well but they did nothing at nothing nothing nothing actually changed structurally it was just right he was just you you had had this shock and people we should have we should have worked on harder we should still be working on it harder and you yeah you have questions why that didn't why didn't happen yeah because I mean like as an explanation for what went wrong in the 70s I mean is the question that we ran out of oil or that for the first time and we started running out of something we no longer had the structures I could create an innovation that would create an alternative do it quickly certainly again my might my cut on this would be that you'd have very important questions why nuclear power got shut down in the 70s at the same time which I think was much more something the left shut down than the right and this was this was seen as the default post post carbon fuel maybe it was too dangerous maybe it was always weaponized I will go in Japan well it's if you believe climate change is the most serious problem in the world it's that what happened in Japan seems like not that big a deal relative to the consequences that people tell us what happened from climate change so so I always I always I always do think and and of course one of the reasons that happened in Japan was we haven't monetized the plans in 50 or 60 years every advance in technology is also proven a weapon against you every single one from stem cells atomic energy immune system it's already projected to be weaponized so that's a natural dialectic and all this wonderful invention it isn't just a systems analysis and the other problem which was discovered fairly recently but also has its long history but also did that retardation thing that you seem to think his only assistance problem he discovered that every time we create more technology we create a pollution stream a pollution stream that actually becomes its own negative force now I wanted to think one thing about this Mars it's been built all night long just to give you a personal note my brother actually wrote the algorithm that the Mars exploration so I've been very very close to NASA love it but I noticed something about the fascination with Mars how many people do you think will go there out of the seven or twenty billion people will be left on a polluted world and what kind of nature will they find there that they cannot destroy that's my question on that cheery note that's important because I think that that you know that sort of logic its superficially you know hard to argue with but but it's you know anything you come up with can be weaponized but you know everything that already exists can be weaponized - that's not really a reason not to change anything you know any social change like might actually be used to hurt people or resulting people hurting people I mean you know what it sounds like is you're getting a prescription of utter conservativism in everything in a society which is like really radically imperfect I'm just saying that that what you present to me is it doesn't seem very dialectical it just seems to be saying that like you know everything has its downside like yeah hi everything could be weaponized yeah everything's gonna create pollution but I mean I think that that this is this is my my alright I one of the more compelling things that I've read about nature and technology was by a physicist named Smolin I made a great impression on me I'm saying well you know we have this I you know people think there's a technological fix to everything and they're crazy and there's also people just say like well let's leave nature alone everything will be fine you know we just need technology is bad and and this opposition between technology and nature is itself a construct which doesn't make a lot of sense and analyze it the basis of a lot of those prescriptions you say all right well global warming is obviously man-made you know the skeptics say no it isn't it just happens naturally you know every now and then the planet heats up it cools down that is true but that's not what's happening now everybody oh that any common sense knows that but he pointed out you know on the other hand like say we actually do through this and survive there are gonna hit a point where the planet does like eat up is cool down naturally if you lot given enough time and it's gonna be just as destructive and devastating is though if it happened you know it because we made it we're gonna have to like actually come up with technological solutions they keep ourselves alive in that case by intervening in nature nature's and all that great not all the time I mean you know could be well struck us off all of its own accord I don't think either of us is sort of sort of Pangasinan about technology as the as the you know simple cure for all all of our problems my I have more some of this negative intuition which is that without technology a lot none of these problems will get cured and so and that's sort of that's something I have a very strong view on there are two and then there are sort of a lot of things and then you know it's still you have all these questions that good is it bad technology is getting weaponized or not or how is it used those are real questions people should need to figure out but but I think with seven billion people in this planet we can't go back to some sort of Neolithic past with which work with ten million you can't go back we've gone too far and we have to go further we have gone too far that's right Peter David thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: Graeber Wave

Views: 167,387

Keywords: Peter Thiel, David Graeber

Id: eF0cz9OmCGw

Length: 63min 6sec (3786 seconds)

Published: Fri May 08 2020