Longplayer Conversation 2014: David Graeber and Brian Eno

good evening we've just been listening to long-player gem Finers 1,000 year music project playing in real time continuously without repetition since the 31st of December 1999 long player is both a piece of durational music and a paradigm for long-term thoughts and ideas and as testament to this for the past decade art angel has invited two leading cultural thinkers aware of each other's work but not having met to conduct a public conversation with no fixed agenda to excavate the urgent issues of our time and how these might best be addressed in the interests of the long-term it gives me particular pleasure to introduce tonight's pairing at the Royal Geographical Society a place long associated with exploration and a need to understand the world Brian Eno is an artist and cultural catalysts creator and producer of some of the most distinctive and influential music of the past four decades as a visual artist he's pioneered new ways of auto-generating sound and light most notably in 77 million paintings and Counting Brian's interest in long-term thinking led him to help establish the long now foundation then he was also part of a think-tank set up by gem fire an art angel in the 1990s that developed long player David Graeber is a social anthropologist activist and writer who The New Yorker has called the most influential radical political thinker of the moment the newly appointed professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics and political science David has written widely about gift economies and value systems magic and the legacy of slavery in Madagascar the Occupy movement on Wall Street and as famously reflected on the history of over the past 5,000 years Brian and David will talk together for 90 minutes and any questions that their conversation provokes please send to art angel via email Twitter or Facebook by midday tomorrow Brian David will post some answers on our website towards the end of the week ladies and gentlemen please join me in giving a warm welcome to Brian Eno and David Graeber thank you very much well Michael invited me to invite somebody to talk to and the story of how I chose David is rather an odd one about two years ago I was searching for a document in my computer something that I'd written and I couldn't remember what I had called it but I could remember one of the phrases I'd used in it and if you have an Apple computer you can search the computer for a phrase so I wrote in this phrase and a document came up but it wasn't actually something I had written and I started reading and it was actually very interesting in fact there was a whole PDF of this document a very long document about 500 pages long and I got really interested and I thought I wonder who this was by unfortunately it lacked the very first section it was 12 sections long the first one was missing anyway I read most of this thing and it turned out to be David's book which somebody had sent to me as a PDF and I had never paid any attention to it and kind of downloaded into my computer so I hadn't heard of David at that time there's a little bit of feedback here if you it's about 1700 cycles and I see the book appealed to me for a lot of reasons one it was about economics in a way but it wasn't really it was about social relationships and human relationships and how those become in folding in economic terms and what the dangers of that are but also an with particular reference to this gathering tonight I love the title it was called debt the first 5000 years and I thought that's the kind of title I like somebody who's thinking in that kind of length of time so anyways since then I had followed David's work then he popped up to my surprise as one of the important members of the Occupy movement which seemed to me a very appropriate use of his time given what the book was about and he he writes articles now again which I keep up with and one of the articles that he wrote recently which perhaps I'll quote a little bit from it it was called jobs I think I'm the phenomena of both I'm the phenomenon of jobs okay and this this quote I think it comes from that piece but I like this quote very much says what would happen if we stopped acting as if the primordial form of work is laboring at a production line or wheat field or iron foundry or even in an office cubicle and instead started from a mother a teacher or a caregiver we might be forced to conclude that the real business of human life is not contributing towards something called the economy but the fact that we are and have always been projects of mutual creation somewhere else he wrote in actually in debt he wrote the real question now is to ratchet things down a bit to move toward a society where people can live more by working less this is a very annoying flyer also interest is not so so anyway let's let's start off with them jobs what we he talks about jobs I say that for every job you need a education so I'm very interested in education in how bad it has become yeah which is I I find an intriguing notion I should preface by saying the article that will set jobs well I've noticed that there's a phenomena whereby if you write or say or do anything that people take notice of in any significant way you will basically want you to do it for the right of your life um essentially make the same speech write the same book over and over again and I became determined to see if it were possible to take what notoriety I got out of that brief moment in 2011 when both the book and Occupy hit at the same time to see if I could actually make myself more afraid so I began a scheming to figure out ways to write about all the things I kind of dreamed about writing about but no one would ever dream of publishing um everything from my reflections on Batman to my complaints about why we don't have flying cars and art on Mars to my theories about animal play and and one of the ones that I always wanted to write was something about the moral and spiritual damage that's done to people by going to jobs that people know don't actually do anything so you meet people like that all the time you know you could have parties I mean all my life I'd run into people and you say well you know your dad's Rapala that's a really interesting I mean you say what do you do and you know if you press and get them a little drunk they'll start saying well you know look I got this job but it doesn't actually do anything I mean don't tell my boss but you know I could easily automate this job away or um or they just kind of made it up to find this niche and they haven't realized that it doesn't do anything and the more I looked into it more I realized that a very large percentage of our workforce is employed by these professions you know I'm the human resource consultant on the strategic vision manager for the East Coast this come um then there's whole industries you know like PR and lobbying that everybody knows don't really need to exist um and then if you populate all the people who do support work for those guys who fix their computers you know like clean their bathrooms that's even though they're doing something but they're doing something for people who are doing nothing sort of second order jobs you know you're always a very large part of our economy doesn't need to exist and that seemed really profound somehow because back in the 30s everybody was assuming that by 2015 you know we don't be working at most a week you realize if you look at the jobs they actually had in the thirties we could be I mean most of those jobs have been automated away except we just made up these other jobs which don't do anything to keep ourselves busy to keep ourselves busy and it's not like there's some central committee scheming this but somehow it does seem awfully convenient to people running the system that everybody is sort of constantly both working all the time and and slightly embarrassed by their secret knowledge that that they're not really doing anything there's a second level of that and this might relate education which is that it becomes almost as if people start to feel that if your job does something you should either don't deserve very much in the way of pay because after all you get fulfilled in work I mean what more do you want where shouldn't be paid at all you know a lot of people or corporations where they say well translator I don't need to pay a translator people like to translate things you know if there's something but something is anyway fulfilling as work or meaning for it actually helps people in some way you really shouldn't have to pay them for it the same corporations of course are hiring all these executives who do nothing it does other than writing reports just having two committees two people who write reports um so we've really enshrined this in England that we pay we pay the most useful people of at least exactly there's an inverse purport relationship between how much you actually help other people with your work and how much you get paid for it so people are a few subtracting value from the world in many cases get paid the most but but the crazy thing is the moralization of that and you see this for populist rage especially in the United States but you see it here too against people who get to have jobs that do something teachers it's a great example and this might tie back to the education thing you know I actually heard there was a right-wing organizer who read this piece and said you know yeah it's really truly started because I said why are people meta teachers when the problems were caused by the school administrators and nobody ever gets mad at them and this guy said yeah it's true he started trying to blame the school administrator it didn't really take and finally when we started talking about teachers everybody got really mad at them so there seemed to be some sense that you guys get to do real work you're you know you teach people things you know you're shaping young lives isn't that enough for you you want like good benefits and retirements to even carmakers you get to make cars that's a real job so there's a sense of you're doing something real you shouldn't be yes well I think what we have in England is is the remnants of the class system which expresses itself in work very much you know so that professional jobs are always automatically better regarded than manual jobs even when those professional jobs are empty as you say and and of course the other issue there is that we now have an education system that insists that everybody goes to university as if that's automatically the best thing for everything everybody to do you know as if if you fail to get to university or you fail to do anything very interesting there then you take a manual job and this this is really a very bad idea and funnily enough it's it's kind of infiltrated the art schools as well so I've been involved in art schools for most of my life really and one of the trends I've noticed in the last 20 years or so is the a kind of obscurantism that has entered into the conversation about art schools and if you can't enter into that obscure conversation you don't really count very much as an artist so it's it's become sort of academia dinner mm-hm in a way that really doesn't benefit the work very much I was an external examiner for a few years at college and we had to walk around and look at students work and to see whether we looked at second-year students to see whether they were fine on course for a degree in their third year so if we saw any students who looked like they were pretty dodgy we would alert the staff who would something about them I remember we are going round once and one of the things we had to do was to read what we called their personal statements these are always absolute bollocks this this is where these poor students who would like to be painters or whatever they want to be are told they've got to shuffle together some some terms taken out of boring French philosophy books and kind of patched together something that looks like an intellectual report and they're always but well I'd say 90% of the time at least absolute crap but they they tick a box you know they they show that art is an academic respectable academic subject with with kind of judge' below and markable results anyway we were going round and there was a young woman there who's a very good artist and she had written her personal statement and it was bollocks like they all know and she included a long quote from Giacometti in which Giacometti was talking about the artist and his vision of the world and his listen is that and she carried on that quote in her essay using still using the word his now one of my co examiner's there was a feminist artist who shall remain nameless who pounced on this word and looked at the girl and said his and the girl burst into tears she realized she'd made a huge ideological error and I thought Jesus this is what art schools are like I'm just not interested anymore you know it was really like some sort of Stalinist error that she hadn't clapped for long enough she had carried on this pronoun and she should have said his and hers or hers anything but his and I thought there's a person who spent their life coming to this work that she's done it was very good and she got tripped up by this so this is this is something that is kind of going on in education they're the attempt to academic and to to dignify anything that is academic and to demean anything that isn't actually it's partly to do with something that comes out of economics the idea that everything should be accountable and edible up but precisely I mean this is what's going on my all universities I've been to just over the course of time I've been there that the amount of time you spend actually doing either teaching talking to students anything involved in actual education recedes steadily as you or you know it's raquan ties and and reporting on and assessing you and your your colleagues performances another piece I wrote um the flying cars one that I mentioned that was my ultimate conclusion for why we don't have teleportation devices and anti-gravity slabs and all those things as all the scientists are spending all their time assessing one another and the second one another's grant applications and it's about 50% besides it Sciences just spent the paperwork and and trying to convince people of money that they already know what they're going to create which of course nobody no real discoveries are made by people who think they already know five years in advance what they're going to come up with yeah that's sort of what's happened in the arts was when you were expected to be able to make a fully coherent statement about what you are about to do I barely know that the book is going to really be about yeah yeah and and you know now I never get grants to write books or if I do I never when spending shake I say I was gonna do sorry I'm just gonna get a bit of water you want something yeah so if we're thinking about jobs you know in 1933 I think Keynes said that he expected that we would soon all be working 15 hour weeks well we're clearly not so and yet we're about a hundred times as productive as we were in at that time so what's happening to all the productivity how could that be what's making all these billionaires by any chance there's certain yeah there's certainly an element although a lot of again a lot of the work is not producing anything it's just the work on the bottom is so productive that you can you you can siphon it all to this sort of parasitical class I was at a tea factory that's us my criteria for who's parasitical is you know if they were to disappear with the world to be a worse place so I think without artists and musicians we it's the answer is pretty clearly yes I mean we might not shut down entirely as it would if nurses or tube workers were to disappear but you know it hedge fund consultants disappeared no one would notice or world might get better in certain ways so but the point is we were asking about Keynes arm yeah I think that you have this idea it's consumerism you know we just want more and more stuff in there but if you really look at the distribution of work it's not like you know the production of various forms of designer sushi or new iPhones is really taking up the bulk of people's time most of the work that the people when I looked at the numbers of agricultural workers largely disappeared industrial work even in places like China India if you look at it globally has declined and domestic services largely disappeared but at the same time its clerical service and administrative work which is tripled from 25 percent to something like 75 percent of the economy and you know we think of it as service economy but a lot of the even those services I think are jobs which are only really there to make up for the fact that people are working too much it's a completely circular thing if you don't have time to cook because everybody's working to all our days and you have to run off to the fast food place or the food court to get things or you need these professions like dog walkers and dog washers and so forth and so on so so you know a certain way or the entire system feeds on itself um but it's the administrative and clerical I was gonna say oh yes I was in a factory in southern France and it was a perfect example but I think it's going on the it was under occupation the workers that occupied the factory for about a year at the time light arrived and they said what happened was it all happened because they boosted productivity workers had changed around the machines to make them twice as effective suddenly the company was making money hand over foot and if this were the 50s and 60s they would have either expanded operations hired more workers maybe even given people arrays of course nowadays we don't do that anymore so instead they just hired more and more white-collar workers um it used to be there were two human resource guy and the boss said by the time the prompt you know of after five years of bumper profits they have all of a sudden had eight guys in suits kind of wandering around in catwalks staring at them all day know these guys that anything to do so they come and started sitting around coming up with schemes so they came up with plans and finally they came on the idea to like move the entire operation to pull and fire all the workers and move the factory machine somewhere else been under occupation ever since but I think the perfect parable for what's happened rather than putting the money into research which they might once have done rather than actually distributing it to the people who have decreased the productivity they simply hire a casa and give them some fancy sounding title and look platon look around for something to do yeah the other thing I noticed is that rather than people working less which you would have expected in the 30s and the forties and so on people now seem to work a whole lot more mm-hmm I a neighbor of mine who's a young father with two kids I saw him out the other night at about half past eight in the evening with his two kids struggling to play with him and he's on his phone yeah I think if we make the presentation on Thursday and the guy is still working right and again work which probably isn't really doing anything lastly reporter someone else yeah his presentation I'm sure will go into a draw with all the others he's done but but the thing is that he it's now completely expected mm-hmm because of smartphones and so on that's why you don't have one that's why I don't have one yet it's completely expected that you are on call long time yeah I mean IRA this is a kind of an American disease Americans are so suspicious of any kind of holiday at all demonstrates a lack of ambition I remember when in the early 90s when one of my daughters had just been born I signed with an American record company who based on the west coast and my wife was also my manager and they would quite often call at 11 o'clock at night our time and chat in these long drolly conversations but had no point whatsoever but you know there's nothing much else to doing if you're and our man in a record company it's a better known job for you if ever there was the really remarkable thing about the piece I should add this is that it was all kind of hypothesis I've been hearing people talk about this for years but you know there's always this question is that how how common is this really our people exaggerating and when I wrote this piece it came up rather rather obscure of that muse we called strike magazine to the left waiting broadside I just started up here in London and within three weeks it had been translated into 14 different languages I've never seen anything like that in my life estonian korean people said they were sitting in their offices and getting it sent to them five different times over the course of the day what's showing that they weren't doing much of their jobs and and and then there were these blogs it was just astounding where people started pouring out these confessionals oh he's anonymously of course thing oh my god it's true I'm a corporate lawyer I contribute nothing to society I just feel miserable all the time so if there was ever a premise that was confirmed by the reaction but I mean it would be very interesting thing you say but educates them to think about how our educational system has shifted to support that kind of thing I've been fascinated by you know what is the purpose of this exam system wherever not only the accountability you know within the systems like education for people like me who do work and work in the Academy but but um you know students are constantly giving exams they're talking now about children practically having a nervous breakdown sort of the constantly azam schedules and I saw there's a great literature sociological literature about school bells and how getting people to stand up and sit down and essentially if you go through primary education it's there to teach you how to work in a factory but especially the sort of time discipline that's required to work in a factory and it's just very self-consciously designed by the people who put it together so this new exam system well I mean there's no Factory said um for the most part where they do these things what exactly are they preparing kids for when they give them the exam so what is in the back of their minds hmm are they going to be worked their recipients are they going really not sure well not only are they encouraging into that kind of work and that way of thinking about work they're also quite actively discouraging other ways for instance you know a child who goes to to take philosophy at school and wants to argue about it it's told no you shouldn't argue about it could you just read the books please and read what other people have said about it we're not actually really interested in what you think about it what what we want to know is that you've read the other relevant source of on it and this this is a common kind of a a level problem now that kids who are bright are told not to use their brightness they're told to use their memories but not their want intelligence one of the most bitter memories I have from school is I remember when we were I was in a physics class this was junior high school if they call it now and I they're talking about I learned from Einstein the universe is finite you know they taught us that and I said wait a minute the universe is finite that means there's a finite number of matter in it so therefore there's only a finite number of possible positions those could take so that means given an infinite amount of time you'd get it get to the same point you've been eventually and that means if causation is consistent then it would repeat so the time must go in circles that would make sense and I proposed this to my teacher and they looked at me like go read Hawking so I don't think Hawking's existed but there was something like that at the time and yeah it's like completely wouldn't engage with me I mean I I thought this is me but isn't that true and and I could for years I couldn't get anybody to respond to this later I was in college and someone was explaining that neech actually proposed this and I was like really oh my god you know what a smart guy but yeah the teachers think well it's a silly argument it obviously doesn't make any sense but the conclusions he took it to a very interesting is it yeah all those years pentaiah yeah so so the thing that I think that obsesses me more than almost anything else is is waste and particularly the waste of human intelligence which you see so much in education there's so much in work actually as well I've got that yeah it's starting again those kilohertz are coming back sorry I don't know I don't know why it suddenly reappears hmm and I was in Sweden a couple of weeks ago I had an installation there and I was taken by the somebody from the Ministry of Culture to an a new school that they're building outside Stockholm which they want me to contribute something to so I started talking to the headmaster who's this incredibly eccentric enthusiastic mad person who I really wish had been my headmaster he he was so thrilled by the prospect of what he could do there in terms of Education and he said something very interesting to me he said I will be disappointed if more than 30% of the education happens in the classroom so for him the whole thing was about setting up a system where people are playing and learning from it where they're going out doing things there's a there's a sort of forest around and he he told me a story which such a nice story he said he is currently working in a school that will inherit many of the students the new school will inherit many of these students he's with now it's just over the other side of the forest and he had a particularly difficult group of 16 year old boys very noisy and making a lot of fuss you know so he's had this ID he said why don't we build a running track through the forest you've got to design it and so these these boys got down and started designing this running track and it has obstacles in it it goes over trees and all sorts of things and then they collected back lots and lots of bark to chip up to make for the track and this this whole project went on for months actually and these boys were thorough be pleased with what they've done you know it was a wonderful example of taking a kind of energy that was chaotic and making something useful of it and he told me about other experiments like this happening in Swedish schools and I thought it's quite incredible Sweden is two hours away we looking at what they interview you know you look at every survey now what's the best country to grow grow old in and what's the best country to be poor in what's the best country to be educated da da da da da you see always these same few places been on the list now then Martin always Sweden Iceland whatever whatever England never America now working for why I am well we're using a half way down you're all the way down I know but why about why are we so arrogant that we can't actually go and look at what they're doing and it's not technical you know it doesn't involve money it's not that there are any insurmountable reasons for doing it except our arrogance that we're Britain we're famous as educators so perhaps we should move on from education I don't know I've got one more thought about it I mean I was reading elix money that's about education as a way of destroying imagination I had a realization that you know what wouldn't you're talking about how to teach you know on the higher education level there's all this discussion on how to foster creativity and foster curiosity in your students and and I'd always taken it seriously until I suddenly realized that and I have noticed that it does have a difference if you talk to people who've gone through the college education versus ones that haven't there's a tendency for example especially graduate education actually you know people will ask follow-up questions so say oh when you say that you mean this or that or they'll go into the logic of your argument pull it out where does it put people without that sort of education very often just looks like trading you know I'll give you mine you have thought of my own so that question in curio intellectual curiosity and imagination you know so it always struck me as intuitively right that we teach people how to do this until I suddenly started interacting with children children of course they do that that's all they ever did yeah um you know it's it's not that there's something you have to be taught people have been untaught and then halfway retaught again yes I think that's exactly what education does it you know we just drive this for curiosity and imagination out of people almost violently beat it out of them and and then once we've done that we take a selected few and sort of put half of it back a job it's like having adding vitamins to cornflakes and yeah I'm sorry of everything and then put it back in yeah the I suppose this kind of what I think is now happening in art schools a little bit hmm I mean there there still are some good art schools but Jesus it's a sad story what's going on there most of the time hmm I think we both got very lucky he's actually went to SUNY Purchase which was basically an art school well why wasn't the SUNY Purchase which was basically kind of an art school um I'm gonna call it a goldsmith so and and it's I think we were both very lucky and that we sort of were of that last generation that you go through those places and come out of relatively modest math backgrounds and all end up doing this I don't think young person would actually be in such a position like us if we were born now would probably have that opportunity oh if I if I ever born now I wouldn't get into accident now because I didn't get enough a levels to get into art school and nowadays you have to is it's really hard to get into art school without some academic qualifications and in fact I remember when I was the best college I was at there were four really interesting students there who always worked together and did a lot of things together and one of them was I would say close to an idiot savant he wouldn't get into anything actually on he only had one low level which was art that had no other qualifications and another one was a guy who had 50 no levels six a levels and 1s leveled I bet you don't even remember as low as do you s levels was I don't know what they were they were beyond all of it so he was super academic but the the kind of ecology of that group of people with this completely intuitive person and this very academic person was was wonderful that was the chemistry that worked well I mean you see this so often in bands as well you know you never ever get bands or very very rarely where everyone is a top-flight musician it doesn't make a good chemistry what seems to make a good chemistry is some mixture of talents somebody who can reliably just do one thing and if you start thinking about intelligence in ecological terms which is something like I'm interested in doing you start to imagine that the composition of societies really ought to be thought about differently I have I have this word I use called C Gnaeus scen IUS which I describe as the genius of a group so this is an idea that came to me years ago there was a show at the Barbican of them early 20th century russian painting and i that was an area that I thought I knew a lot about it was the tight the area of painting that I was most interested in actually and I went to this show at the Barbican and I saw about a hundred and fifty artists whose work I'd never even heard of and they were really good a lot of them as well and so suddenly my picture of that scene completely changed it wasn't just a few stars like Rodchenko and tacklin and melia vich and so on suddenly I saw this whole swamp this tropics of people at work and a lot of the interesting people were not even the artists they were collectors for example there was a gay guy sagacious chicken who was a very important collector at the time who was really responsible for encouraging a lot of those artists in ways that nobody else was doing so I started to get this idea that a scene is really composed not just of a lot of bright people it's composed of it also includes the cleaners and it includes the you know the the people who decide how the room is going to be set up for example and it includes the people who buy the work actually it's there very important there was left out of the story includes the curators the gallerist the critics as well they're all part of the ecology of the scene so I started thinking that education really should have been a little bit more like that art school education used to be like that there was a time when art schools would actually only look at people's work amazing though that now seems they would that looks pretty interesting let's have her it's a dematerialization someone told me that I had written a piece where I talked about how artists were a kind of mock proletariat for the financial sector and some of the least they have these skills and and and someone said well maybe they used to be but increasingly you know artists don't they don't even teach you how to do welding or these sort of material techniques they assumed they'd go hire someone else to do that so increasingly you know artists were just trained to be executives okay well this is this could bring us to another subject virtual ism okay so have you ever heard of Fermi's paradox yes but I don't know if I could repeat it okay so so years ago there was a conference scientists one of them was n Rika Fermi and the conference had been called to try to assess the likelihood of there being life in in the universe other life in the universe so they at that time they thought they were about ten trillion stars we now know there's about a hundred trillion at least but even on the basis of 10 trillion stars they thought there must be so many million other planets where life is possible there must be quite a lot more life in the universe than just us so Fermi said if there's so much life in the universe why haven't we seen any of it you know the paradox is even if there is that much why why haven't we seen any sign of it what's like the Sevi paradox why haven't we found television broadcast from other planets that's right exactly so the I think he's an evolutionary psychologist Greg Gregory Miller wrote a very interesting short essay hmm where he said well look at the history of our society our human society as soon as we're able to we virtualize things so for instance the the taste for sweetness obviously evolves because it's a good time to eat fruit when it's sweet has maximum nutritional value and it tastes nice and so on and so on the taste for sex evolves because it's a good idea that we procreate otherwise we're not a species anymore so on so on so the various things we do instinctually have an evolutionary history but he says as soon as we can we virtualized them so we we abstract sugar from things and we just have sweets we don't eat fruit week sweets which actually don't have any nutritional value or we don't have children we masturbate or whatever else we do that we virtualized sex and so he said perhaps the trajectory of societies this is that as soon as they become technically competent enough to actually communicate with other planets they're too busy masturbating to do I mean I use that as a kind of blanket term for turning your attention inwards you know the the fact it's sort of what's happened to us you know we we were on the moon and then we came back a few years ago and we came back yeah that was actually how I that was my sort of vulgar materialist interpretation of post-modernism that I remember I was I was in you know watching one of those new Star Wars movies the really bad ones and I was thinking well this is a bad movie but the special effects are amazing well remember those of those clumsy science fiction and special effects in the 1950s you know people from back then could watch this movie I bet they'd be really impressed then I realized nothing wouldn't because they thought we'd actually be doing this stuff by now you know rather than coming up with these amazing ways to simulate it they would be like a really bitter and angry hot on the moon you just come up with better movies to make believe you're on the moon yeah um computer programs and I know it's off simulation and of history nothing new oh now I get it the reason why we have these ideologies that you know history is come to an end you know we won't be saying this if we were actually on Mars you know it's just a sort of way of coming to terms of the fact that we can't acknowledge that we actually thought we'd be doing all this stuff that now we're just doing virtually yeah the the end of history is a is a very pernicious yeah piece of theory I think and and I think still largely believed by no matter how much history keeps coming back yeah yeah yeah so so this sort of brings us to capitalism okay let's talk about that let's talk about captain's so in them 2008 capitalism was on the edge of collapsing for a for a few minutes it looked like and it looked like that all these people who had seemed so incredibly important and incredibly smart turned out to be not at all smart I don't know if any of you have read Michael Lewis's most recent book I forgotten the title of it they're flash boys that's what it's called it's a very very good book Michael Lewis is a great writer because he he does actually understand how the system works technically and he makes you realise that the people running it very often don't hmm so so there's there's a system in place that is complex and in fact creates money essentially that's what it does it creates money without creating value essentially or they're creating what you could actually call wealth wealth being normally defined as something as some addition to the world of possibilities none both of jobs jobs yeah so so anyway what what happened in 2008 was it 2008 or 2007 we both was that everybody realized or should have realized that it wasn't rocket science and furthermore the people who thought it was rocket science weren't rocket scientists even yeah they had nuclear physicists who were designing some of these hedge fund programs and I was part of the mystique it's like you know you couldn't possibly understand this these people know what they're doing they might not be very nice but you know they're incredibly smart in the way the way of expressive it was poetically it was to talk about these nuclear physicists that they'd hired but I talked to some of those guys and they they said well we just figured out ways to do the same things that they were already doing a lot faster yes about speeds I mean we don't really I mean it's what they were doing was really simple and the amazing thing is that that there was this moment where we at all the narrative that we'd all gotten you know markets take care of themselves these people are really smart they know what they're doing there's some sort of mysterious secret that you couldn't possibly understand it all just collapsed it turned out not only are these things just scams they were really clumsy scams it was like you know so bad bonds and when a crashes the government will bail you out those basically like slightly more complicated than that but not very much and and there was a moment when when everybody sort of sat down and said oh wait a minute what other thing do I assume to be the case might not also be and and almost in it was a fascinating it was like two weeks Oh everybody is like well what is an economy and markets what does that mean and and and and why do we you know work do you why do what is it how is value produced and you know and then everybody sort of recoiled in horror at the very idea my I have a friend who actually says that this is what the middle class is for essentially air every generation or so capitalism falls apart neuromas falls apart at least once and there's a moment when everybody sort of stands there slack-jawed and the middle class or the people essentially who whose life is entirely dependent on stability and time because I'm you know rich powerful people live in history everything's flexible poor people can't really plan ahead their lives are too precarious middle class of the people who can kind of guarantee that if I invest in this my you know getting a degree in orthodonture II for my child and thirty years old having this I become so so it's all about you know projecting yourself in time and those guys basically you know don't really like the capitalist system very much but when the crisis comes they sort of hold their nose and do what they have to do to patch it back together again so essentially that's what happened romantically at that moment everybody said no to stop thinking that you know everything will go crazy if we start doubting the things there's nothing to see here nothing this year's close your eyes yeah so so he he has a phrase and I have a sort of rather similar one his phrase is the machinery of hopelessness my phrase is manufacturing insecurity so it seems to me that a lot of a job of government especially in the last 12 or 15 years has been manufacturing insecurity people offered the choice between freedom and security will nearly always offer security in my experience they they really do not want to take the risk of what seems like a precarious future if it's painted precariously enough so we could make the argument that you can't have freedom unless you have a certain degree of security baseline that's right so you need a baseline security so so the the sort of one of the jobs of government and it's it's a PR campaign as a propaganda campaign basically is to do two things to one to make the world look very dangerous which is a way of saying you need us you need us to look after things and the other is to make it look very complex you couldn't understand anyway and this is this is one of the techniques for kind of cutting away at forms of social protests you know there's there's a whole campaign to make it look like people who go on demos are a bit stupid mm-hmm they're a bit demons they're not very well dressed and they just like making a lot of noise and this this is this runs right through all the media I think I mean I I go on demos and speak at them and so on and I'm quite conscious of this some slightly bad smell that puts around me from it makes me look emotional and a bit uncool ice yeah and and it gets worse the more radical the demo I still remember his moment in Quebec City we've been battling we've been tear-gassed for you know eight hours straight or pitched battles people tearing down walls fighting back and forth the cops with baton charge ISM you went down to this street to get fresh water and fresh from something like fresh air and stacker down there and some reporter walked up to me and said well you know according to polls 75% of the public say they're for free trade how would you respond to that and they were just like babbling something lis utterly incoherent I mean you know I was this person you know later I realized that you know the thing to say is why are you using the pretty free trade I'm not against free trade we're not talking about free trade you know there's there was something I could have said I didn't say it but I mean it's like asking somebody's just been hit on the head do math problem I and you know I'm a person who's basically paid to be articulate I usually can feel those things pretty well but even I was just living it yet so I can get I'm paid to be inarticulate people like from artists they like in articulately I think all right it's true they sort of they sort of try something out of integrity yeah yeah yeah anyway when you were doing occupy in New York I actually came there my girlfriend we we came and sang oh we shall overcome I believe it was no something like that there's something very traditional and folk II with Laurie Anderson as well and what was interesting about that was that by that time it had sort of melted down into this tent city mm-hmm with all sorts of people associated with it and lots and lots of police around yeah pleat court and the police looked quite embarrassed I thought they they didn't quite know what they were doing there because I think they didn't feel unsympathetic particularly to them especially at first they propagandize thought but at first they were very very sympathetic did any of them defect change sides but there was one guy actually there was a guy who would come in it's policeman's uniform loose at Philadelphia police uniform so was a different color than in the Europe ones yeah he had actually been a precinct captain and he was very useful to people because he actually explained to us police psychology and was eventually I think they started the suit to forbid him to wear his policeman's uniform what what would be threatened him over a smattering what what would have been your hopes for occupy if it could it could it have carried on longer do you think I think so I think that what happened with occupy was really a the short version is I feel that the right-wing radicals have a much better allies in the sort of moderate right or the mainstream right in America than radical left has allies with the mainstream left I mean as soon as anybody threatens Second Amendment gun laws the entire Republican establishment goes crazy you know they don't like those militia people living there in the sane but they want them around because it makes them seem like a reasonable alternative and and the different Craddock you know the Democrats and Berkut have not learned this simple lesson that you know you can't betray your radicals on policy issues if you've already betrayed them on existential issues like you know so we think God is excited about the First Amendment as the Republicans got excited by the second we'd still have been there they assumed that we were going to join the political process and become some left-wing Tea Party and so for a while there was insane media I've never seen anything like it I remember there was this case where there's this guy named Tony baloney he's a notorious bro he's great name yeah he's always pepper sprays protestors he's been doing it in New York for like practically a decade everybody so nobody Bologna's come in he's a sadist he just does the same and Chum police have impunity and um there was a scene where I saw I've heard oh there was this terrible nation national scandal these protestors got pepper-sprayed an occupying looking at the TV and I saw this guy sauntering up and just the way he moved in his shape so hey that's pretty Bologna sure enough it was and you know and this time it was a national scandal he doesn't like dozens of times people I knew so somehow there was a huge amount of attention to things that people normally ignore and when people actually see it they become excited and people came down to join us and there were occupations all over America and and as soon as it became clear that we weren't actually going to become a political party support candidates it's our position was that essentially the u.s. is not a democracy in any meaningful sense it's become a system of institutionalized bribery so we really meant by the one percent not only the people who get all the profits from economic growth the people who make all the campaign contributions so practically 99% 98.5 I think of it so essentially they there are people who've managed to turn their wealth into political power and their political power into the means of acquiring wealth largely by reducing the entire population into debt I mean essentially the laws that regulate the banks are now written by the banks and it's all design it's a finance capital the finances just other people's deaths it's all manipulated so we weren't going to join the system because joining the system which is a system of bribery is like saying well you know if you want to get rid of the system of bribery you need to raise more bribes and compete with the other people and obviously that wasn't going to work but when they realized we were serious about it suddenly you know after this brush there was a complete media blackout so I think that in terms of what happened I think what could have happened was what's happened in other places which is a rhod D legitimation of the system the example I always take is Argentina this is what we were aiming for the ones we have in the hole most Americans everybody loves democracy but everybody hates the government yeah um that's why I'm an anarchist anarchism system obviously without the government but so you wonder what do they mean by democracy right because you hate politicians you're suspicious about the government but you love democracy um so in a way we thought we weren't a great tradition trying to create these modes of direct democracy let's not lose me dream that we could instantly you know the government would dissolve away obviously that's not going to happen right away but you want to create a broad movement whereby the growth of that kind of popular power could itself force the political class to address real people's concerns just to really legitimate them so you thought the real ace in our hole we had was everybody hates politicians everybody assumes they're all corrupt bastards accurately enough and and so the Argentina model this one scene most plausible what happened in Argentina most people don't know how the third-world debt crisis actually ended and partly it was a after the Asian crisis of 98 but the key moment was Argentina's default and essentially there was an economic crash a series of popular uprisings that overthrew three governments in a row but rather than try to create a new government they essentially said their slogan was que se vayan throw this you know they get all that out all politicians are bad we're just gonna run things by ourselves they created popular assemblies there were but still are actually took over factories or worker run factories I've even tried to set up an alternative currency an economic system just completely ignore the existing political class and it got to the point where and this is I think the key revolutionary moment that one has to achieve the moment when politicians can no longer go to restaurants but Argentina it got me though that that would be a great thing yeah right they would have to like put on false nose mustaches and things like that to be able to go out to eat otherwise people would throw food at them and that I only wish that could happen even if it only happened to Tony Blair anyway so so whether you get to that point the government has to do something and they had nestor kirchner it was a very very moderate social democrat realize okay to religion to meet the political system we've got to do something radical so they'd be faulted on the argentine deck um which sent ripple effects across the world which effectively ended the circuit world kept crisis so in fact that rejection of the government their refusal to operate within the terms of the government rather than make policy proposals pose our own new party or candidates but to say the hell of them all actually cause the politicians to do something he never would do other ones which is of enormous benefit and the planet as a whole so that was a kind of model that we were pushing for a dual powell power model where the very existence of this alternative would itself also simultaneously provoke the politicians to actually address people's concerns yeah you've said something earlier which i've noticed which is that the the right is much better at dealing with revolutions than the left is and i I think there's a reason for that which is that everyone can agree about the status quo and agree to bury their differences in order to defend it if that's what they want to do but what the left is usually doing is kind of trying to market competing dreams and what kind of future there should be and some of those dreams are pretty incompatible so there's always this continual infighting on the Left there's some splitting up into factions I think that's a very hard problem to solve there that that futures are much harder to defend them than present space for us to do with with impetus I mean we found that when the camps were operating we had a common project we yeah we had different visions of the sort of end point but we knew we were on the same path and people cooperated extraordinarily well then after the violent suppression of the camps that it all came out and everybody started hating one another again really good one why do you think the violence produced that well partly because there was no immediate thing we all had to do you know if you create a camp for creating a community there's food that has to be produced there's cleanup there's there's so many different things you need to coordinate and you also see people regularly very I mean this is one reason why Weis ation has very pernicious effects it's um there are certain topics that in those social movements I'm involved with we must always say just do not discuss this on the internet do not discuss this on Twitter anything having to do braces of sexism because you just operate differently when you're looking at someone yes sure sure yeah the the big difficulty on the internet is anonymity I think that really was the big mistake when when I was first on the internet before it was called the internet when there were 5,000 people on it really we all knew each other's names and this was in the mid-80s soon okay and so that people moderated their behavior because they they knew they were identified hmm I just want to make another quote from you I think I've got this right you said in one of your things capitalism is just a bad way of organizing communism yeah that's right which might be a little I think is very neat and I like very much my first wife was the secretary of the British Communist movement for ten years and she she lived in communes and I lived in a couple with her early on and one thing that I noticed after a while is that actually every political system works at a small enough scale so we saw communes that were anarchists some that communists some that you could call anarcho-syndicalist some that were sort of authoritarian some that were like Mormon you know right patriarchy that sort of thing and what impressed me was that the the system had no relationship to whether that the name of the system had no relationship to whether the commune worked so I started to think then about scale as being a consideration in in these in and it's never it's never taken seriously as a consideration we talk about political systems as sort of absolutes so you know Margaret Thatcher was the the great example of somebody who tried to extrapolate from the corner shop to the whole economies and think and look where it got us that's an interesting question because I often get the line that well you know all of this Democratic stuff it could work with a small group of people you know the moment you get to a city or let alone you know something larger than that it would never work and this is true that you know if you want to do things democratically it's sensible to keep things on a smaller scale it's possible at the moment I'm actually you know I have written this book on 5000 years of debt I'm actually now working on a 20 or 30 thousand years scale for my next one we're going to archaeologists friends will like it yes y'all it is friend on this name David when growing and and this is one of the points you want to address because it's actually quite surprising um what you see if you look at history it's not necessarily the case that the larger things get the more you need to have authoritarian structures you can't have the same structures on a large scale as you do on a small one but there's lots of examples for example all of egalitarian cities the first thousand years of Mesopotamian urbanization yeah we have no signs of social inequality or social class over often indus valley civilization the same thing there's whole cities like Teotihuacan where all the houses are exactly the same size everybody says well there must have been a king we just haven't found him yet or where he would live but you know there had to be the big city you know but in fact the evidence seems to imply that egalitarian large-scale systems are not that hard often because on a very large skilled aren't that many things that have to be decided on the other hand it's really hard to find examples of egalitarian families so you know maybe that commune size you can do the talking you have to abide by radically eliminating or transforming you know family structures so I you know in fact we're tempted to come start talking about inequality from below you know you need to look at the structure of the family and for long periods of time there's gender inequality age and equality but on even on a very large scale fairly egalitarian relations can be maintained and inequality sort of creeps up from that micro-level know everything you know that guy Robin Dunbar do you know he's a dumb Bears number me I'm bars number yeah so for those of you haven't heard of it Dunbar's number Robin Dunbar was looking at cerebral cortex eyes in primates and he found that there there was a very strong correlation between the size of the cerebral cortex and the number of creatures that the number of other creatures that a particular animal would associate with so our nearest relatives I think but do something they they have a cerebral cortex which is about forty percent the size of ours and their group size is about forty percent the size of ours they associate with about sixty other creatures baboons to say whereas our our group but Dunbar's number our group size is about 150 to 160 after that we don't really have a relationship with we can't have close relationships with more than that number of people so so this this is I think what makes what makes them any kind of politics work at a small enough scale because actually what really works to make societies cohere is not laws or those kind of policy agreements but honor and shame hmm you know the thing the thing that makes social groups come here is either the feeling of being cast out of them or the feeling of being thought well of in them that that makes a very big difference and so what happens when when groups get larger is that you you either have to federate so you have lots of small groups who talk to each other as groups or you start to think about legal systems legal systems effectively replace honor and shame actually they're they're the codified version of them honor and shame I guess but there's also modular sort of extendable versions of personalized relation you can establish you know so the famous Middle Eastern tradition when you buy something first you have to have tea and then you could argue with each other yes yes so there's like micro versions you can do yes so I guess what you're doing when you have tea is you're trying to establish a relationship where honor and shame can are relevant right yes because honor and shame clearly don't operate if you're never going to see the person the game and I I wrote a book on value theory and and one of the things that really facet is is what value is all about is that it's about an audience you need to realize forms of value but it's it's irrelevant to realize them in the eyes of someone else and in fact for any persons society are those people who care that you got whatever it is you're trying to get we do a whole social science based on that you know because everybody in this room as I said I didn't get that sentence sorry oh you could probably create a whole social science starting from that inside you know what are the things that you think are important to achieve in your life then who do you care and knows whether you did it or not yes so everybody in this room has a different sort of virtual body of people who they want to know that they got something or didn't get something that they care what they think and another body of people that never really occurs to them to even wonder what they think of them yes so I think I think Dunbar's think was in trying to understand what what that body consisted of in terms of numbers there's a very beautiful story in that Garrett Hardin book called managing the Commons mmm-hmm about a religious group called the Hutterites oh yeah Hutterites were a European I think Germans originally yeah they went to America to start to live their religion prop and they in some very interesting intuitive way arrived at this very peculiar and elaborate process of establishing communities which is that about 10 years before they estimated a community was going to reach about a hundred and fifty people they would buy a piece of farmland somewhere else and the whole of the what's called the mother community would start building houses and barns and whatever else they needed on that community and they didn't they knew that half of them in ten years time we're going to split and go there but they didn't know which half so they're all building they're all building the sister community which is usually close by you know twenty miles away or something and they're building it as though they might live there there's a 50% chance that they will dig they're sort of like cutting the pie in half and then having the other person that's right you divide you choose exactly so and then they had this very peculiar ceremony the night before the split the whole community would pack all of their stuff ready to leave for the for the sister community the whole community everybody would pack everything and then during the night the elders would pull straws or whatever they did they had some suspiciously semi-random process by which they would decide who went to the new community and so this this was I thought such an interesting set of intuitions than you you first of all set up a situation where you recognized that there was a community size limit but then you invented a process by which the host the mother community would really care about the the daughter community by making sure that they actually built it you know still as fascinating and they views a random selection which is another thing I think actually when we're talking about problems of scale and how to transform egalitarian relations randomness is I think very very important I when people say well how do you choose representatives um you know if you're trying to scale up directly Democratic structures I think that I've heard this for a long period of time but one of the more interesting insights I encountered was that for much of European history the idea of voting was considered the aristocratic way of choosing people to rebels magistrates representatives is you know it's aristoi means the best of our stock recei is rule of the best the idea is you take these guys who's already considered themselves the best and you choose which one is best of all and it's not that different than you know Homeric warriors sort of assembling followers or Vikings or Mongols or it's the same kind of system whereas the democratically was a random lottery mm-hmm so the ideas anybody could become a magistrate it would give them basic literacy sanity test or something like that and you notice if you want to do let's throw your name in the Hat and they pull a name out and there's a lot of people who are talking about reviving that I am occupy a thens was one of their big suggestions ever pointing out that no matter how bad the crisis got less and less registered people vote in Greece yeah it can't be because they can't care oh it's obviously because they're rejecting the very idea of a representative system it's they were suggesting everybody who just who's registered but doesn't vote should be counted as a vote against the principle of representation yeah and those parliamentarians should be chosen by random lottery yeah I I think that's a very good idea I I wrote a letter to some newspaper a few years ago suggesting that the House of Lords should be randomly chosen you go there's you know we were having all these arguments about whether there should be a House of Lords and so on they still get the titles yeah Oh though for the duration of the duration of it their time in Parliament but I I think that could be very very interesting because one of the great surprises of life is how incredibly responsible people become if they're trusted exactly it's the basic principle of anarchism and this is why I find it convincing is is that the basic principle of anarchism is when people act like children mostly is because they're treated like children but it becomes a vicious cycle you know we're used to the idea that people act like children and therefore we treat them like children but if we stopped you know a few people still would but most wouldn't and there's no way that there's really no way to get people to act like adults that works other than treating them like adults and we have this idea of the block in most anarchist groups operate by a consensus principle people assume this will never work you know busy it is anybody can veto a proposal it has to be based on some moral principle can't just be I don't like it but if you feel there's something terribly wrong it's like everybody's the Supreme Court or has the right to took look and everybody says a lot never work because you know every block all the time and in fact what we usually get in these groups again they're the problem of scale here but it is that nobody ever does it and we have a problem people don't block enough because it's like you're giving everybody a little bomb and saying you can blow up the thing at any time and and everybody suddenly feels well I've got you know III feel so good about myself joining with the popular will even though I don't think this is a very good idea I could stop this at any time yeah there they become super responsible yeah yeah well we we both have Anika's backgrounds actually we we are both working-class anarchists originally that was sort of my first political interest I didn't know that yeah yeah when I was 14 I used to sell a magazine called anarchy that's right in Woodbridge Suffolk the bewilderment of do you get any buyers justice my uncle used to buy one yeah it was a it was a lonely job I actually came to Anarchy a fetus of my family and not that they were anarchists but but my father fought in Spain in the International Brigades of course the International is very much propagandized against the anarchists but he lived in Barcelona when it was run on anarchist principles um how long did that last about two years before the Stalinist shut it down but he said it was a remarkable thing was again this is actually where the jobs their idea really comes from what the major thing reformed that that the anarchists did is they said we got rid of white-collar workers and they discovered that it didn't make any difference yeah the Train still ran more or less as much on time as they always did the factory still produced goods they just sort of had workers do shifts doing all those jobs and it worked quite well the phone company became the government effect or the phone union workers so is that these people would call up and say I want to speak to the government and say I'm sorry we don't have a government you know but oh do you need tanks will will direct you to a car factory you know that kind of thing I mean there was a war so it made it easier but but the interesting thing so he knew that this could work and I always say that most people don't think enter kids it was a bad idea they think it's insane right okay obviously that would never happen but you know I didn't grow up in a family where people thought it was insane because they've seen it work you know so if it's not crazy why not be one well and the funny thing is everybody has experienced a bit working at small scale and that's what I mean by the the everyday Communist yes yeah I mean we ought to come in at them all the time if it's all this means from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs actually what I discovered it you know with the Occupy movement is that Americans for example are much better at communism and they are democracies everybody has you know experience participating in a communal project where things are allocated according to from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs yes that's what you do if you're trying to fix something if you're trying to get a task done together but you know it when it comes to getting together in large oops and making a collective decision no one had ever done that yes yes that we had to like learn very painfully and paying for it from the ground up if you could change one thing about American politics you're allowed to make one one law oh god did you do I would actually go back to the First Amendment and actually make it law you know it says in the First Amendment Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech or freedom of assembly for of the press um and in fact you know there's nothing but law abridging created a they say well of course you've got a freedom of assembly just an end to get the cops permission first you know and it's like you know you just try to talk to American journalists and point this out like well you know if you have to ask the cops permission to say something that's called not having freedom of speech right you know to print something so why is it different assemblies and well there's traffic problems you know there's no there's nothing about right to traffic flow in the Constitution there is something about right between of assembly um so I just say enforce that law and I think the rest we can take care of ourselves yeah I I think I would I would say that each political party only has a certain amount of money to spend and that's it well that would really help yeah that would radically change America I mean this it is so dominated by cash now in fact it's you can do both it's it's it's it's funny how Americans are so very self-righteous about corruption in other countries and I know and you look at these like you know there's the corruption index and usually Nigeria or Russia comes out number one and America is always like you know no corruption and and it's like well yeah that's because giving a politician money to influence their vote isn't illegal in America how could there be corruption I remember people like like you apply for a visa in American they say there's a special expedite fee you know here check here $100 will speed it up it's like aren't you supposed to put that like you know like between two pieces of paper and slip it to somebody totally upfront of course of course there's no corruption they've legalized it all yeah yeah we we have to finish in a few minutes I just want to read something else from you which actually reminds me of ha-joon Chang the Korean economist who can't be here tonight because he's in Malaysia neoliberalism has always been wracked by a central paradox it declares that economic imperatives are to take priority over all others politics itself is just a matter of creating the conditions for growing the economy by allowing the magic of the marketplace to do its work all other hopes and dreams of equality of security are to be sacrificed for the primary goal of economic productivity but global economic performance over the last thirty years has been decidedly mediocre with one or two spectacular exceptions notably China which significantly ignored most the neoliberal prescriptions growth rates have been far below what they were in the days of the good old-fashioned state-directed welfare state oriented capitalism of the 50s 60s and even 70s by its own standards then the project was already a colossal failure even before the 2008 collapse so this this reminds me of how Joon's book where he talks about he just goes through all the sort of economic miracle countries you know South Korea China know that all the ones they did the opposite he just shows you how every single one of them didn't do what the Chicago economists said that they were doing and said that they ought to do and the few that did of course fell flat on their face like poor Russia's attempt to yeah right it was a complete mess okay so I think I think we've been very there there are lots of subjects we didn't get we didn't talk about defense all right defense that's why we're gonna have to figure out some way to get together again yeah okay well thank you very much and thank you for coming

Channel: Artangel

Views: 97,825

Rating: 4.9264369 out of 5

Keywords: Brian Eno (Musical Artist), Longplayer, David Graeber (Author)

Id: cuBpOXGLn_o

Length: 81min 16sec (4876 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 17 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/digitalgokuhammer]

Pretentious, hypocritical and smug. I really enjoyed it.

[u/HAL-42b]

Long time since I've been in the education mill. With the benefit of hindsight I wish I was asked back then about how I wished to educate myself. Would have saved so much time and so much bullshit.

What I do not believe in is the notion of a few people getting together and 'reforming' education yet another time.