into your academic project, which we might kick off with the question of how is the Internet like the sidewalk? That is my favorite question, Matt. The Internet is so like the sidewalk. It's really useful to ask how the Internet is like the sidewalk. So let's think about the sidewalk for a moment. The sidewalk is a beautiful thing. It connects all of our houses. We use it every day to go to the playground, to go to the school. You can think about the roads and the highways that connect us. But let's just think about the sidewalk for a moment. Nobody is anti sidewalk. You can talk to your friendly anarchist down the street who wants nothing to do with government and who wants to live off of dumpster diving, and they are not anti sidewalk. You can talk to your libertarian friend who wants to smash the state and wants no post office and no taxes. Taxes. And typically, they're not anti sidewalk either. So what's it about the sidewalk that's okay? Well, we have agreements around the sidewalk. Your sidewalk gets messed up. You're supposed to repair it. There are laws about who's supposed to repair it. There are standards. You can't just repair it with chewing gum and duct tape. You have to repair it with concrete. And we like our standards. Nobody really wages a creative war on the sidewalk. So those parameters are in place, and they've been in place in much of North America and Europe for about two hundred years. They're so in place that we take them for granted. Meanwhile, we have proposals for how to use the Internet and how we could regulate it to make it work more like a sidewalk, more like there are regulations, more like anybody is free to use it, anybody can come and go, and there would be regulations to keep it open and free and usable and cheap. There are regulations around that that often go by the name of net neutrality, and those are highly controversial. But when those come up, your libertarian friend might condemn it as socialism. So I like to go back to the sidewalk metaphor in order to understand how is it that we got some things in common. The sidewalk is definitely not socialism. Like any capitalist country you can think of, we've got sidewalks. We're happy with the sidewalk. So why did the sidewalk work out so well? And what can we learn about the way the sidewalk got started that would help us to understand where the conversation about the Internet might go? So that's my thing. I think about parallels in history, and I think about when the sidewalk was new, what happened. And then I think about other iterations of that, when the interstate highway was new, when the railroad was new, when early forms of peer to peer map making and early pre Internet structures were new, what did they look like? And I think about the debates that came up when those happened that allowed us to get beautiful things like the sidewalk.

Yeah. Absolutely. If, you know, if I were an economist, I would use a fancy word for this. That word is externality. An externality is something that we decided as a culture, and we're just gonna share in common. David Greenberg talks about how radical externalities are, that they are basically socialism. They are zones of socialism that we've decided to all share in common. And if you look at them, they're absolutely everywhere. So, you know, you can look at any banking corporation that's totally dedicated to the free market and to wealth and private property management. And there's a stapler in somebody's desk and the vice president comes through and he needs a stapler. Does he pass over a dollar to use the stapler on the desk of the clerk? No. Those staplers are uncommon for the entire office building. Nobody even thinks about it. So the sidewalk is another externality like that. We don't see them because we don't think about it. We don't have conversations about what we hold in common. We just do it. And that's why going back in history and thinking about when sidewalks were new, when we started sharing staplers, questions like this, when we stopped and started sharing resources together, that can really open up the question. So we haven't had the same externalities all along. Those externalities have come and gone. There are moments when we decide we want more stuff in common and we want less stuff in common. And it's not as simple as communism and capitalism. In fact, the origin of the sidewalk is with the birth of capitalism.

Okay. Once upon a time, there was a man named Adam Smith. And in 1776, alongside an important revolution, Adam Smith publishes a book called The Wealth of Nations that sets forth an important vision of this new system called capitalism and how it might work. And one of the things that he notes in there is that there's been a lot of entrepreneurial activity with roads in Great Britain. New toll roads, improved roads, or connecting towns and villages. And when the road comes in, it looks like a lot more trade is gonna happen. But often, more trade doesn't happen because the guy who built the road wants to get paid. It's called a toll road. And at the toll, there's a toll booth and there's a barrier and there is a troll, which is the guy in the barrier who's gonna charge you money. You can't go through the barrier unless you pay the troll. So the toll roads are a kind of entrepreneurialism which chokes entrepreneurship. If you're a poor man with a wagon and you're gonna sell apples in the village, if you can't afford to pay the troll the toll on the road, then you're not gonna get to the village. You're not gonna get to the market. You're not gonna make a buck. So it limits who's involved. And part of Adam Smith's genius is that he points to that, and he starts railing against monopoly. Monopolies of this kind prohibit exchange, and they strangle what he wants to believe is capitalism, which he wants to believe makes capital flow horizontally. So there's good capitalism where the capital flows horizontally and entrepreneurs get rewarded and then there's bad capitalism where the capital only flows up and the rich get richer. Toll roads strangle capitalism, but free roads and open sidewalks allow everybody to get to market, hence the wealth of the nations. It's not just England that's gonna get rich in this system. Adam Smith has an argument about how all of the poor folk in Wales and the poor folk in eighteenth century Scotland and the poor folk in eighteenth century Ireland are also going to get rich if you would just build roads to connect all of them if you would just connect the entire country I mean, I'm getting ahead of myself. That's not really Adam Smith. That's his friends. But Adam Smith is from Scotland, and he has some friends who listen to him, and they start up a lobby in parliament, which starts lobbying for roads. And hey, voila. Britain gets its first national road network connecting London, Dublin, Edinburgh, and allowing the more rapid exchange of goods and letters, mail, newspapers between those former colonial capitals in a way that's, you know, for contemporaries, that is the signature that capitalism works. You have an externality. We own it together. We maintain it together, and trade flows on it.

where it's really easy for the state to invest in them because the maintenance is never gonna change. The technology is never gonna change. Same old sidewalk. But then if something is really new, like the railroads, well, then then we need entrepreneurial investment because we need to keep up with the latest innovation. So therefore private investment. But that's actually, in my way of thinking, that doesn't hold up. If you read the arguments of nineteenth century people and you look at how the railway worked, there are nations that went with private railways and nations which said a railway is actually just like a sidewalk. And the nations that went with the sidewalk argument tended to have less redundancy, fewer crashes on the market, and to have railway systems that served centers of population and circulated people way before the nations that were connected by private railways. So the classic case of this is in the American West where you have lots of railway startups getting started and collapsing. Richard White wrote a book about it called Railroaded, which is about the enormous waste of human labor and raw capital and energy that happens when you have the railway system totally run by private enterprise across the West. You're building railway systems that you don't need, and then many of them collapse. Economists like Schopenhauer will celebrate that as creative destruction. Yeah. It's true. Many of those railway lines are gonna collapse, but think about the technological innovation. Richard White looks at that and he says technological innovation. That's not where the technological innovation is coming from. What the railways drive is a mass handover of capital to America's elite. If you wanna look at what's actually happening, there's technological innovation in places like like France and Belgium, where the state owns the railways. You have plenty of opportunities for technological innovation in those places. But what you have in The United States is that to sponsor this culture of railways that are started and then collapsed, you have The United States basically giving free land grants to the railroad. And the free land grants aren't really free because those were confiscated from indigenous people. And the wars against the indigenous people required military expenditure. They required feeding soldiers. They required forts. All of that land had been seized on the promise of turning it over to small holders, so ordinary working people. But then it turns out that an enormous tract of that land has been handed over to the railroads as compensation for connecting railroads across the West. So it's capital turnover. And for a lot of observers in late nineteenth century America, this capital turnover starts to bother them because they look at the balance sheet and they say, this isn't about innovation. This is about seizing land and it's making these wide open lands in the West Of America super expensive. Land is getting sold back to ordinary middle class settlers or ordinary farmers at an inflated price. And those farmers are moving in trying to be homesteaders. Meanwhile, the Durants and the Vanderbilts and the other railway fortunes in the nineteenth century have made a killing receiving free land in return for putting down the railroad. The railroad line collapses. The railroad isn't serving the common good or the common flow of exchange as it was supposed to. And instead capital is just getting consolidated in the hands of the elite. So to me it seems like there's a sort of a special perversity in compensating

Well, the New York City subway, you know, the same thing happens in London and in a lot of major places, there are these private lines, eventually they collapse or they're nationalized at a certain point. Like when you go to war, they might be nationalized because there's as with the quarantine, a moment tarry time when citizens are too busy doing other things to take the train or to take the bus to their normal job. So maintenance requires the state. Maintenance requires the state. If you're going to have occasions like war or like a pandemic, if you think that might ever happen when your resource is going to be disrupted, then you really want the state to come in and take up maintenance. And maintenance works so long as you have a state and a population under the state who believe in infrastructure. And by believe in infrastructure, I mean, you know, going back to Adam Smith, you have to start thinking about Adam Smith's views of capitalism as a certain kind of capitalism that's supposed to work for democracy. It's launched in 1776. That's not a coincidence. Smith is curious about forms of human creation that work for the many not for the few. And he doesn't think that free markets in general will do that. He thinks that it can only be supported when you have lowered transaction costs which means not only dispensing with tolls and tariffs but also dispensing with the little toll gatekeeper and the little entrepreneur who's getting in the way of the flow of information which might be your intercom provider or your cell phone provider. You get rid of them by nationalizing them and collectivizing them. It's not socialism. It's actually at the heart of Adam Smith.

That's right. So Keynes got this. Right? So this is why Keynes invents the idea of the multiplier. Multiplier is an additional value, a mystical additional value that happens for every dollar government spends on certain activities. In Keynes's view, if the government buys a bunch of ice cream, there's no multiplier because you just eat the ice cream and it's gone. But if the government spends a lot of money on an interstate highway system, then all of a sudden, it's way faster for a lot of people to get to work, and people have opportunities to start a gas station at that intersection that wasn't there before. And there are more people passing through who need to buy ice cream, and so ice cream is bought and sold. And so more transactions are happening in general. People have more revenue in general, and the government can raise taxes on them to pay for the maintenance of the infrastructure because everybody's earning so much. So that's called the multiplier. That's the whole theory about why interstate highway systems and subways are supposed to work. And, you know, I'm grateful to you for talking about the incentives of adding more participants because part of the rationale of the generation in which Keynes is living, there's a body of thought about infrastructure that we've largely forgotten, which is associated with an often misunderstood character, the journalist turned political economy theorist turned critical empire, Henry George, who was famous for losing mayoral race in New York City at the end of the nineteenth century. He's often chided by American historians as this foolish figure, this larger than life caricature who goes into politics and fails terribly. But that's not the end of the story. George goes on to have a speaking tour of The United Kingdom Of Scotland, England, and Ireland. And those events are extremely well attended, and they're intended by both leaders of popular movements like labor movements and the Irish movement for freedom and independence home rule from Britain. And they seed a debate about what makes infrastructure stronger at a time that's absolutely crucial in British history because it's a moment when the working class have just gotten the right to vote much later than they have in America. You have all these working men who have been in the factory and George says to them, infrastructure is a system that pays out more the more people are added. So what we need is a tax system that taxes people who benefit from the social value added to being at a crossroads that's socially created value. It's not something that the owner of that gas station did to get rich or be creative. You had that place on the highway at the intersection. More and more people are going through the highway because the highway was placed there by all of us. And it's all of us who are making that convenience store owner rich. So let's tax them and then redistribute their wealth by making the highway longer. And that will mean that more people are connected on the highway. We'll be adding more and more participants to this exchange, and the economy is gonna get stronger as a result. So this line of thinking is it's behind Keynes. Keynes, of course, is British. But gives us many of the ideas that we tried out on the new deal. It gives us the recipe for the new deal when the American government is spending lots of money reconstructing the whole of the American landscape, building roads, reworking forests, building high schools and post office, really rebuilding infrastructure on every level. That's based on an economic set of ideas about what happens to the economy as you get more people involved and as the government takes up the cost of maintenance.

that essentially connect the world in ways that nobody dreamt of before. There was no Facebook when I was in high school. There were bulletin board systems. There was no Twitter. There were these electronic realms with no visual interface where you chatted. But if you really try to think as a historian and you think, where did those bulletin board systems come from? I mean, was Facebook inevitable once you had the bulletin board systems? Facebook and the bulletin board systems look pretty close. There were zones for people to get involved and share ideas. Facebook is a bit bigger than the biggest bulletin board systems, but that's not just Zuckerberg's fault. Right? That's also about the increasing cost of personal computers and cell phones and points of innovation that are coming from, again, broadcast participation. Lots and lots of little mini innovators back when Apple was being made out of somebody's garage. And so then you start asking, okay, where did the bulletin board systems come back in the nineteen nineties when having a personal computer was super new? Again, they come out of culture of Silicon Valley garages. This is the sort of thing that fred turner talks about and a culture that's really been thinking hard about the virtue added of sharing things in common. We're talking about Palo Alto in the 1970s and early 1980s in which Fred Turner has mapped all of the co ops, all of the collective living institutions that you walk by and your way from one garage that's making personal computers to another. It turns out that most of these amazing new ideas about infrastructure systems are coming from parts of our society that really valued sharing a lot of things in common. And that made it easy for not just Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, but for 10,000 engineers of their generation to have a side project where they were tinkering. And what Adam Smith insisted and what a lot of canny economists have insisted since then is that it's that culture of broadcast experimentation. It's not the huge 1,000,000 fold reward at the end of it. It's the access to experimentation. It's the access to the market when you're broke that prompts entrepreneurs to start tinkering. So if you believe that that raises a lot of really difficult questions about the current world of these fascinating connectors. Nobody's talking about nationalizing Airbnb. Nobody's been talking about nationalizing eBay. And I'm not saying that we should nationalize them, but I'm really curious about the experiments in, say, local town owned wifi, Fi, what that's meant for the entrepreneurship and the culture in general and the handful of towns in North America where the Internet is treated like a public utility. It's like the water. It's something that everybody has a right to. We should be on the lookout for studies of how those towns that treat the Internet like a public utility have fared in this moment of quarantine when it's such a struggle for so many families to get connected to remote schooling. Right? You treat it like a public utility, you're prepared for a lot of contingencies that you wouldn't be otherwise.

kind of culture, even going back to the seventies, you know? What do you think about that? Yeah. So that's I mean, this is where the metaphor of the the sidewalk becomes super useful. Yeah. Just because we have sidewalks, it doesn't mean that we're Soviet Russia. Right? It doesn't mean that we're Maoist China. We're not abolishing property or seizing other people's houses. We have sidewalks. We take them for granted. We theorize them less than we should. We talk about the things that we have in common maybe less than we should, but we still have private houses all around the sidewalk. These things can exist cheek by jowl in forms of communism. I would say that I, you know, I think, Matt, we've been intellectually harmed as a culture by the legacy of the Cold War. And what I mean by that is that in a world in which socialism counts in if you look at the sentiment dictionary that people who do text mining use to count sentiments like love is a positive emotion and hate is a negative emotion, that sentiment dictionary counts socialism as a marker of fear or disgust. So that attitude towards socialism or anything in common is a relic of the cold war in which everything is black and white, your America or your Russia. And actually, if you look at the deep history of America, if you just look at how Silicon Valley worked, if you look at the stapler circulating in the office building, or you look at the history of the sidewalk, the current use of the sidewalk, it's not that simple. We need externalities. We believe in externalities. We don't have a free and open conversation about how or when something should become a commons. So when is it that the internet should work like a public utility? When is it that Airbnb has finished being a private reserve and should enter back into something that's maintained by the community? You know, those are really important questions, and they have to do with what you think the role of the government is or what the role of experts is. Do you need expert entrepreneurs out there to make more Airbnbs or Airbnb entrepreneurs out there to make more Airbnbs or Airbnb alternatives? Do you want a world of Airbnb alternatives? Do you need one monopoly? If there is one monopoly, could it be run more efficiently by the state? Those are all open questions unless you're living in a world where we're terrified of communism, where communism represents the greatest opposition possible to our identity.

So I'm telling you these stories about eighteenth century sidewalks and that's based on work that I did fifteen years ago. So for the last ten years, I've been thinking a lot about Henry George and thinking a lot about infrastructure in the twentieth century and thinking a lot about the cultures of experimentation that the Internet grew out of. And not just the experimentation in Silicon Valley, but in the kinds of worker owned co ops and experiments with appropriate technology and cheap solar panels and cheap devices for getting water out of the ground that were circulating in places like India in the nineteen sixties and seventies. I mean, it seemed to a lot of people. You read small is beautiful, this treatise on the future of technology that's published in, I think, 1968 by E. F. Schumacher, which is still gospel to a lot of engineers. Right? And a lot of engineers in Silicon Valley love this book. And what it says to them is that we're we're going to go to a culture of innovation in which the startup cost of your farm is nil and the startup cost of your company is nil and everybody will become an entrepreneur. And we can design that and we will design that by making small scale cheap technology that's affordable to ordinary people. There's a very real connection between that publication of that book and the personal computer and the cell phone. This culture of it has to be cheap enough and it has to give everybody access. It's a ideal of democratization of the economy through technology. So I think we were living in a culture that really privileged that point of view from the 1930s to the nineteen early 1970s. Something very strange happens around 1974. In 1974, there are some moves made on the international scene, the level of the World Bank, which start to shut down the initiatives at the United Nations that have been supporting meetings to talk about appropriate technology and worker owned cooperatives in India and in Africa. So there were bureaucrats who were interested in building the future technology for the small farmer. They were interested in building the future technology for the entrepreneur in India, and they're essentially defunded. And the message that comes down is that they're defunded because we love American capitalism and we hate communism. So, okay, wait, you hate communism? What kind of communism do you hate? Right. You hate what's a worker cooperative that's 200 small farmers who share a cow or a dairy facility. They all have cows, they share a dairy facility and then they lower costs. That's not Soviet Russia. That's not the man telling you what you can and can't buy. That's a group of entrepreneurs working together. So the fight against communism wasn't characterized by that kind of agitation against shared technology or shared bureaucracy or shared infrastructure, sharing blueprints until around 1974. And then the last throes of the Cold War entered this very strange phase in which an American run World Bank is moving in tandem with US owned multinational corporations. And you can see that in the case of agriculture because there's this move away from worker cooperatives towards industrial agriculture, which was backed all the way by McNamara and the World Bank in a way that resonates with things that are going on at the Ford Foundation. They're American multinationals. Again, not little American entrepreneurs, but like the Ford and John Deere corporations are benefiting from this. They sell tractors, they sell pesticides, they sell to the richest people in India, and the smallest farmers can just go away. So what you have at that moment is an aggressive kind of capitalism for the richest capitalism for the richest Americans, the richest multinationals coming and steamrolling over a very fertile participatory culture of small scale technology and infrastructure for ordinary people to share information and get involved. And we did that. I mean, that was an American move that crushes a lot of initiatives around the world. I mean, it doesn't entirely crush them either. They they manage to survive, which is a great thing about being small and cheap. You survive even having the the bureaucracy taken away. But the organs of the United Nations that have been doing all of this work to facilitate these exchanges are incapacitated. They're cut off at the knees. Okay. So that that happens and they kind of struggle on. It's interesting to look historically ten years, twenty years later, Google shows up in these communities that had cooperatives thirty years beforehand. You know, Google says we're bringing small scale technology. We're bringing peer to peer participatory action. And everybody says, okay, that's great. And you see the Google and society initiatives. And what do they do? They spend money for, like, a month, a year. They make a little film about it and then they disappear. So there's no maintenance. There's no sustained effort at the infrastructure unless you're already so lucky as to be served by Google. You're already affluent enough to be one of the people who is served directly by them. There's nobody who's really in a sustained maintained way working for the promotion of cheap available infrastructure. You could tell the story of one laptop per child and how that collapses. But again, it's kind of the same story. It's a story about insufficient investment. Private investor wants to come and pours money into it. There's a lot of smart design, but it's just one design. A private actor can't do the same sustained work to distribute opportunity as a state, a permanent bureaucracy that has a permanent maintenance budget. And so there's a lot of magical thinking about the free market that happens in these circles. You know, not that the market is wrong, but magical thinking about the free market. If I just create one laptop per child, if I just create the golden instrument and redistribute it, then soon enough people in Africa will be using this and they'll be entrepreneurs and Africa will be saved, saved from tyranny. Right. And as we see that, then it happened. I mean, it seems like essentially people tried to construct

Right? Yeah. I mean, you can think about it in a not to get all esoteric, but you can think about it in a spiritual or a psychological way. Jung says in the winter, the tree puts its energy into the ground. In the spring, the tree puts its energy into its leaves. So we as human beings, we need solitude. We need a moment to retreat into ourselves, and then we have other opportunities to go out and socialize. There are introverts and extroverts, but everybody's a little bit of an ambivert. Everybody likes a little bit of back and forth. And our economy probably needs that back and forth as well.

Yeah. It's a tricky subject. I mean, what the history of infrastructure gets us there is useful and maybe not the entire story. But historically when states have run infrastructure the requirement for infrastructure actually whether it's public or private even if it's a private railroad states have placed lots of restrictions on the railroad. They have to be neutral. Right. So you can't say you're Jewish you can't use my railroad. You're African American you can't sleep in my hotel. That's forbidden in most places and most of the regime of modern infrastructure and when it's not that's super an interesting story. So it has to be neutral, it has to be accessible to everyone, has to be maintained, and it has to take you where you want to go. Right. The infrastructure of newspapers is the post office. So the post office is required to deliver the newspaper to everybody. So now you have a situation where Facebook is both the newspaper and the post office and it's delivering some things to some people and some things to some other people and it's not transparent at all. And one of the great things about democratic governments and bureaucracies they're not always fully transparent but they're always means of getting that transparent information and then debating in a public setting. And when there's a crisis Right. Then it's the duty of the legislators to bring that into public and to have a discussion about it. But there's no mechanism to do that with Facebook. Right. You know, why did my friend's email get through and mine didn't? Why did my story disappear? You aren't allowed to trace it. You don't have information about it. It's not transparent. And so you have no idea how neutral or not it is. And the fear is that those levers are being bought at neutral or not it is. And the fear is that those levers are being bought and sold and you know we're right to be concerned about that because that historically if you have the post office being bought and sold I'll deliver some mail but not yours. That's been one of the levers that despots pull. That starts to look like a tyranny and then like a government you don't wanna live under.

for the provider of services acting like a mini government. In a sense that happens all the time. Your landlord. Your landlord is someone who sets the rent that you pay them but on the other hand they're regulated. So Facebook is acting like a government but they're not regulated. So I think you know this is another one of those opportunities where we need to think about the ways in which we've been willing to regulate in the past. There have been historically rent control laws, laws about how much the rent can go up every year or every quarter, standards, building standards, can you house someone in a building that's collapsing? Can you house someone in a building with no heat or no running water? We say no for the common good, you know, because we don't want people to get sick and the Spanish flu is going around, people have to be able to wash their hands. So we've given ourselves permission in the past in a capitalist society to regulate micro governments in this way. And now we have a meso government, all these meso governments like Google and Facebook. And I think transparency is helpful. Now where I take a lot of hope is that I'm not sure how to regulate private speech in a public realm. And I think there's some really tricky issues there, which will be delicious to lawyers. You wanna work out what public and private really mean. But my concern is really the infrastructure and what these historical allegories can offer us. And what I get excited about is not so much Google and Facebook. What I see is I think they're kind of dinosaurs. They're kind of a dead end. They're like the railway just before the railway collapsed. Like they're doing a lot of harm. They're getting really rich by consolidating money. It's not clear that they're making so many other people money. I mean, they're influencers, but what is that? Is that vaudeville? I get excited about the other forms of social infrastructure that are emerging right now to deal with questions of transparency. So, Matt, we've talked about, for example, the dub zero movement in Taiwan, which began sharing government data with the public, and they began by replicating government web pages in a place where citizens could find them. And then they wound up participating in this global movement of citizen assemblies, which are gathering sometimes in person and sometimes online, where citizens are asked to consider information about some charged wall issue, for instance, abortion for themselves and then then to write legislation, which has been passed in the legislature. So those assemblies are really interesting to me because in a sense, they are an infrastructure, especially if it's a web page that's curated to help you see what is it that the majority of citizens agree about, not what do they dissent or what's the word cloud of the most frequent word, but what are the statements that most citizens would agree about, and then how can we refine that agreement to pass legislation together? Once you start using infrastructures of those kinds, you start pulling apart another monopoly that's an effective monopoly in our society that's another one of these blind spots. And that monopoly is the monopoly of representative legislators. So our elected representatives in our democracy, because our democracy dates from the eighteenth century and it was really hard to get across the country on a horse, we have a system of democracy where we trust people, and we are forced to trust people who in many ways we barely know, who are thought to be loosely incentivized on the basis of their career and reputation to work for the common good. And yet that's probably the least participatory format for passing laws that we could come up with. We could think about a direct democracy where everybody votes, but it's way more participatory if we start exploring these other realms of what happens when you have Google Docs or you have an intelligent AI that says these are all of the sentences that people have in common, all of their values that they seem to have in common. Let's work on that. Write some legislative statements. That kind of an infrastructure allows you not only a direct democracy, but a creative evolving democracy

So in the literature on participation, and there's a huge literature on participation in social sciences. Chris Kelty just wrote a book about this called The Participant. There were a lot of exercises earlier in the exercises earlier in the twentieth century with what was then called participation that were not really about devolving authority to people. So for example, there's a famous experiment at the end of the 1940s at a pajama factory where there are women workers, and they invite some of the women workers to meet together and tell management how things could be more efficient. And it turns out that if you ask workers what they think, whether or not you then act on it, the workers work better. So this was reported and this becomes the seed of the literature of modern human resource management. But through and through that literature it's abundantly clear that the people who are thinking about participation aren't interested in actually giving workers control over their workplace. We're actually taking the workers ideas. They are just interested in rituals, rituals of socialization where people are asked about how they're doing and they're asked about what could be better, and that seems to improve their willingness to work. So it's not the same as inclusion. Right. And it might be the same as coopitation because then you're taking the workers' ideas and you're not compensating them if you take their ideas or you're just making them feel better. Right. So that might be somewhere in between co optation and therapy. But that's not where the story ends. I mean, there were also experiments in the twentieth century that included things like starting up worker owned cooperative. So there you've got a complete devolution of control. The people who are working on designing windows are also the people who are directly profiting from that. And that turns out that that makes a pretty resilient company in a lot of places. So when we start moving towards citizen assemblies, we're getting back in touch with the more radical of the participatory traditions, not the ones that are about coopation, just showing up and feeling better, but the ones that are about actually using the wisdom of the crowd, actually discerning what values democracy has in common. You could think about a lot of really retrograde reasons why you wouldn't want to listen to that. But in effect, we have a democratic system that's trying to get at something like a consensus about the common good. We're just doing it in an excessively slow fashion, you know, which is appropriate to the eighteenth century when when people have to get back and forth between Washington and Virginia by horseback. Maybe not so appropriate to an age in which we can just pull not all Americans, but a huge sample of Americans on any given day via a text message. So what should we do with that? And I find these experiments in democracy to be really instructive and really, I would say hopeful, hopeful about the possibility of resolving some of these issues about transparency or public will or where you get the will to solve a big problem like economic inequality or homelessness or climate change. Where does that will come from? Well, perhaps it could be solved in the form of a citizen assembly in which there's an opportunity for public will to emerge and to evolve in the face of new facts in a way that it simply doesn't seem to be possible in this world of echo chambers. Right. Which is maintained by, you know, this private, non transparent infrastructure that wasn't a facebook, that it wasn't built to serve all parties in the way that the post office did. You know, in a sense we've taken a step backwards towards the world of tiny villages where we hate our neighbor village and we have no idea what they're like, cause we never talk to them. That's the world of echo chambers. It's like the medieval village where surfs aren't even allowed to travel without papers.

Well, first things first. I mean, in this country, we've got a Republican party, which has increasingly defined itself over the last four years as being the party of voter suppression. So then you're going backwards even further. And it can do this. You know, this is allowed because they're relics of former moments of voter suppression in American history which are aggregated together in the form of the restrictions on the register of voters. So most European nations don't have a registry of voters. You don't have to register to vote. You have a government issued ID, and at whatever time you get the government issued ID, you are effectively registered. So you just have to show up with that ID, and that's it. And we think about what that means for culture. Well, they have higher voter turnouts as a result, so that's one thing. You have more broadcast participation. So if you think participation is a good thing, that's a really important thing. You also think about all of the labor. I've been going around with my daughter getting out the vote for this last season. When you think about a culture in which professors and school teachers and other dedicated members of society are using the bulk of their powers in the lead up to an election. Just getting out the vote, just getting people registered, not even talking to them in a town hall engaging them about the issues. I'm not Right. You know, we're not on the phone persuading people to vote for one candidate or leading them through deep conversations about what really matters. I mean, I'm a professor for goodness sake. I do this for a living. I talk to 18 year olds about their basic values and coach them on how they might think about them in a more rigorous way. And I would love to do that for my community, but we don't really have a venue. And there have been, of course, experiments in democracy and deliberation, like this conference that was held outside Dallas that brought together a bunch of subjects to deliberate and to talk to people from across the aisle. And it turns out that if they do that once, then they're better educated and they've read arguments more carefully a year later. So I think this is a really crucial moment in which we can kind of just shrug our shoulders and say infrastructure exists. The sidewalk is fine. Facebook is fine. It's fine how it exists. Or we can start saying look the sidewalk didn't come from nowhere and we didn't if we didn't have a sidewalk it would be a different world. So what are the choices right now? How do we build a permanent zone for deliberation and democracy and maintain it? Should that be a public utility supported by taxation? How do we build an evolving forum for democracy and citizen assemblies that write our legislation? How do we make that something that's also maintained, not just as a one off experiment? So, you know, of course, it has to be an experiment before it's generalized, but it needs to be an experiment that has maintenance and permanence built in. So you want to do it at a small scale, do it in a smallish city like Knoxville.

governance problems. Yeah. But all of this chatter, it's coming out of a moment of confusion about the world in which we live. Is The United States Of America, is it a democracy or is it a capitalist country? Well, it's a democracy. Do we need to experiment with democracy? No. We've been at this experiment for democracy for two hundred years, and we have lots of other enormous experiments with democracy to look at. I mean, look at India, where we have 90% voter turnout. It's not that they don't have problems, they've got terrible ethnic strife, but the trajectory of democracy has been to heal those problems and sometimes privilege chokes it. We live at a moment in which privilege has been choking a lot of aspects of American polity. And so the privilege will tell you that the solution is more privilege and we need more tax breaks and more power in the hands of the few. I think the solution is more neutral transparent infrastructure. Does anybody have a problem with the sidewalk? No. Does anybody have a problem with the interstate highway system? Well, you know, the families of the people who were displaced in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, and that was not done in a fair way right it landed on the necks of Latinos and African Americans. But aside from that my great grandchildren used the highway and are probably glad that it's a highway rather than a toll road because then they couldn't get to work. So it's not that we need to experiment more. Yeah. We need to talk about those things that are working, and we need to build. We need to build more instances so that the proof is in front of us. You know, more instances of citizenism assemblies. We need a million sidewalks. We need to build a million sidewalks for talking about democracy and for talking about climate change and talking about the food channels and food safety and how medicines get to us. We need, you know, maybe a million infrastructures for all of these things and we need to collectively start learning and educating ourselves about what a transparent functional infrastructure that serves all players neutrally, what that looks like because that's what all of our success is. Everything you like about capitalism, everything you like about democracy, that's what it's built on.

You know? Yeah. But, you know, like, the democracy and deliberation people, they've been doing these experiments for twenty years, maybe more. It's robust results that they've published about, documented about, that have been the subjects of news stories. So it's not like the documentation isn't there and it's not like the argument for democracy isn't there. Vivid proof of concept is another thing. You know that means I heard about it and I read about it and that's okay but when my brother went there and he talks about it all the time now I can't ignore it. So that means you know we've got the proof of concept we need to scale up. But you know the chatter I think the chatter about the state it's pernicious and it's clear to me that it's very recent. So you know I'm in my 40s and I grew up in Dallas Texas where I currently live surrounded by republicans and I grew up not hearing an ounce of the condemnation of the state that I feel like I hear on a regular basis over the last ten years. So the sense that I make out of that is that the noises of the cold war are back. The condemnation, the easy condemnation of anything socialist is bad. I didn't hear that when I was growing up in the 1980s. Britain was a socialist country and Britain was our ally. So socialism was, you know, the the nice middle way. It's not communism. It's not the problem. And the new deal was taught in my public high school in the Red state as, you know, the model that the model of what governments could do for people, something that were, rising tide had raised all boats for a vast portion of the American people by doing relatively simple and cheap things like planting poplars to stop the dust bowl from blowing away the topsoil of the middle of the country. So it's not as if people, you know, you hear news commentators talking as if American history is one long history of red states hating on the government, and that's simply not true. That sort of rhetoric started to emerge at the end of the 1970s, by the beginning of the possibility of any effort to regulate the Internet, the major companies of the Internet, but also for any opportunity to regulate commerce in general. And over that same time period, we've seen the decline of public schools. We've seen the continuing underfunding, under maintenance of US infrastructure with, you know, boards of engineers regularly writing reports saying all of the dams are going to collapse. Lots of cities are in their way. We don't have the infrastructure to hold Houston and New Orleans and all of our coastal cities against climate change. And then there's climate change. You know, we we have the the writing on the wall about a major catastrophe that's heading our way, and we're dismantling NOAA. We're dismantling the EPA. So we are living. I think you have to see this if you're a person who thinks at all about history. Think you're on the right, you think you're on the left. But if you think at all about American history, you have to see this. We are in a moment of a crisis of collaboration. And that is absolutely desperate because we're talking nonsense about socialism and about communism. To hear people talk on the media about their hatred of the state and of governments, you would think that they hated the sidewalk. They don't hate the sidewalk. They started attacking the the post office, which is nonsense. That's one of the oldest institutions of democracy. We Don't need to put the post office on trial. That's nonsense. We're talking like crazy people. And I think we're talking at crazy people because the stakes look so high and people are so nervous. They're so nervous about all of these externalities that we can't control, like the weather or that we can only control by taking a deeper dive into a shared infrastructure system and shared governance. And we don't have a lot of clear thinkers in the public realm or in the academy who have been talking about shared infrastructure systems that could write communities and allow them to make decisions together and reach bigger and bolder achievements of collaboration. That's desperately what we need to deal with the climate saga, to regulate carbon and secure our cities. We need a lot of collaboration and a lot of faith in each other. But the beautiful side of this is that we're also in this incredibly fertile, creative moment of technology in which we've seen the emergence of these beautiful infrastructure systems around us that allow us to rent cars and rent houses. You know, Airbnb is wonderful. We can do all of these things at a distance. We know that if you build an infrastructure, we can collaborate. We just need to do a little bit more of it and start learning from the places like Thailand and Iceland where people have been leaning into the shared infrastructure for debate and discernment and legislating themselves and building and maintaining these sites of infrastructure where democracy can be reborn. We need that vitally and we need that right now.

Yeah. So I I co authored with David Armitage a book called The History Manifesto, which you can get open access online. We published it open access. In The History Manifesto, we talked about long term struggles, long term crises, for instance, climate change, economic inequality and global governance big nuts to crack and are only possible to understand not through economic theory and not through the philosophical or religious theory of the day but through vast comparisons of different systems over time, different nations over time, over centuries ideally. We talked about how humanities are probably the part of the university that's best suited to make those comparisons. Humanists have been in a crisis and a crisis that is typified by talking about smaller and smaller time periods and horizons. And we talked about the reasons, the reasons that humanists have been concentrating on smaller and smaller subjects. Just this poet, just ten years, just this one little village, they had to do with a dream of perfectionist rigor in the social sciences born of the nineteen seventies. It was very noble in its own way, even though it had the long term consequence of meaning that debating long term truths and the direction of society is something that you would find less and less in most history PhD programs today, I think really to the detriment of society. So, you know, we published that book in 2015. And since then, there's been a minor renaissance in books taking a long term perspective on many of the angles that we suggested. So for example, Walter Scheidel, the Stanford historian just published this amazing monograph on the comparative history of inequality in all of time. Scheidel's diagnosis is dark, super dark. I won't give it away. He thinks that this democratic experiment and all of these experiments and participation and infrastructure are just a blip in human society and we'll give up before we do anything cool. Kind of book you need to like drink with a whiskey in your hand. So but you know he's not the only one. So then there's a the Yale historian Sunil Amrith who writes about 200 of weather and water in India and where India's water crisis comes from and how to understand this climate driven droughts which are, you know, people are really worried about that devastating the Indian economy and population. People in India are very afraid right now. So he talks about that in the light of two hundred years and how much of drought and famine it was a consequence of the British and the way that the British decimated the institutions of Indian governance in the nineteenth century with the result of making famines and droughts worse. And so how far can we think about reason to hope? So I found that I found that to be a profoundly useful book. And then there's Jeffrey Parker's survey of environmental history. There are all these environmental historians who are doing like two thousand five thousand years of environmental history and asking really profound questions like how is it that nation states adjust? How do economies and cultures adjust to an environmental crisis in which people are being displaced? And, you know, because we've had this in the human past, a series of volcanoes goes off at the wrong time and the harvest fails for three years running around the globe. And so some countries double down on individualism and some countries double down on welfare. And guess who does better? It's countries who double down on welfare. How do you know this? Because Jeffrey Parker was comparing huge numbers of societies over huge numbers of time and he has better climate data than anybody's ever had. The climate data than that we have now because people have been scraping pollen out of mud and they've been looking at ice cores. We've got all of this really rich data about like harvest failure and what people were eating and who starved that we never had before. So we've got big data. So they're trying to understand, you know, when they give you this thesis on welfare, it's not a pipe dream. It's not a utopian like go and read the book there's a lot of data. So humanists are coming back into it they're wrestling with questions of infrastructure, of communality, of how we support each other, of whether we're destined to destroy democracy and for all resources to end up in the hands of a micro elite. They're asking these questions. They're really looking at it carefully and I take a lot of a lot of delight in seeing that conversation happen. I think we'll see more of it. I think there's no book I wouldn't tell you to read one book. I would tell you to read at least those three and maybe 10 of the books that have been written about those topics. The way that you phrased the question a little earlier, you said, are the humanities a form of infrastructure? So that's not my phrase. That's a phrase that you and I heard from our friend Stephanie Dick. And Stephanie Dick is another person who thinks about the history of technology and the history of infrastructure in beautiful and intricate ways. And I didn't get the chance to ask her exactly what she meant by that phrase. But as I chew on it, what I think is that the humanities are a form of infrastructure in that they are accessible to everyone. Any one of you can get these books, and they're shared. They're maintained by experts, you know, who frequently have tenure at our great universities. Your tenure and the university is one of these great nineteenth century forms of society that didn't exist before, certainly didn't exist at the scale that we have it now. And it exists to solve human problems so that there's some expert around who you can call if you say, you know, I'm NPR and I really wanna know how do people survive climate crises. Well there's a guy who's been studying that and thank goodness. So those sorts of roles it's actually not just the humanities you know also the agricultural engineers and the civil engineers in the university. When we started planting a university for every state or 10 universities for every state, the idea was that we would take the best of human knowledge wherever it was. It might have been in the army. It might have been working for the king, and we would generalize it and make it accessible. So again, another infrastructure so that every farmer's son can go and learn about the most efficient way to raise chicks or the most efficient way to build a culvert so that your farm doesn't flood. All of us are gonna get richer. So that's definitely a form of investment. And in the most idealistic version of that dream, it's not just the agrarian engineer and the civil engineer and the economist. It's also the medieval historian and the theologian and the professor of creative writing and the poet and the painter so that the son and daughter of every construction worker can go and have a moment talking to these individuals where they feel they taste something about some bigger human experience, and they start to look at their family and say, oh, my mother worked every day caring for the family. She's paid a third of the wages of my father. Is that the best we can do in society? Oh, I grew up Right. In a family that didn't vote. What is this thing called democracy? So if the humanities are an infrastructure, they're an infrastructure that's about raising the collective bar about how we have these other conversations. And also auditing the way these other conversations have worked. This democracy thing, how has that been working out for the great grandchildren of slaves? Have they enjoyed that democracy? So we are the auditing arm.

are helping them deal with. Does that map onto your worldview at all or no? Oh, it does absolutely. You know, the caricature of the worthless humanities degree when when I was in college was underwater basket weaving, and it's so relevant, and it's so micro cosmic. And why did we just spend that money? So today when I hear Saturday night live or some, you know, some comic making fun of the humanities, it's different. It's channeled from a different place. It's, you know, sent my daughter to college and she came back with Antifa views. You know, she's all about rights for indigenous people. Well, those are two different things, right? Underwater basket weaving, a, doesn't exist as a major. That's why it's funny. And it's not about the shape of justice. You send your daughter off and she studies the indigenous Americans who were massacred in order to make room for the railways and you have a richer understanding of the costs at which were sacrificed to make enormous economic fortunes in American history. And that offers you a platform for casting a more critical eye on the enormous fortunes of a Zuckerberg. It offers you a way to look around yourself and say, is this really the only way that this can happen? You know, could I incentivize more entrepreneurial activity if we had a cooperative or if we had free education or if we had some other system that isn't the winner gets all? Capitalism flows horizontally. Is that a thing? Adam Smith's idea. Would that be okay? You want your daughter to ask those questions. You want your son to ask those questions. And you're absolutely right that those are the questions that get raised when we're in a deliberative democracy. They don't get raised otherwise.

Yeah. That's right, Matt. And I'll give you a concrete example. I have a friend who is an executive in charge of data analytics for Netflix. Well, in the humanities, there's a frontier field called text mining. And what text mining does is that it uses some code. It uses AI and things that are built over in computer science. And then it asks humanistic questions like how were men and women talked about differently in these screenplays, and is that different than it looked ten years ago, where they talked about differently before and after Trump, and then how are African Americans talked about, how are Latinos talked about. Are they exhibited in these screenplays as showing different feelings? And then what does that do to viewers? Like if I show these screenplays to a Latina viewer, is she just gonna turn it off? Okay. So if you're Netflix, if you're Amazon Prime, do you wanna know when the Latina is gonna stop viewing? Yes because that's the only thing you're selling, right? You're not selling pajamas, you're selling screenplays. If the Latina stops watching, you're dead. Right. Now do computer science majors have the skills to do that kind of analysis? Well absolutely they've got the skills to count the words but do they know what the words mean? Do they know how to ask all of those categories about change over time, change over place, how we talk about objects versus how we talk about feelings, what it is that triggers people? No, they don't and it's very hard to teach them. So I teach coding and I teach text mining and there's a learning curve for the humanist who learns to code. They take it up pretty quickly. There's another learning curve for the computer science major who hasn't had a single class in literature or art or psychology who gets thrown into all of these questions. And they aren't used to writing essays. They aren't used to thinking about these categories. Like if you tell them just what to code they can do it and they learn quickly but if you try to teach them how to think it takes a while. It takes more than my class. And so we're looking at a situation in Silicon Valley and I've had this conversation with people at Facebook and Amazon and and Netflix. We're looking at a situation where the people who really understand the data analytics often are looking at the data and saying, I need a humanist in here, but they can't convince their executive to hire the humanist who can code because the executives have drunk the Kool Aid that says the only useful people have engineering degrees. Let's hire more engineers. Let's hire more neuroscientists.

Well, there's a room in between. Right? There's always a room where those questions meet. Sure. In the conversation about, you know, the Netflix thing, you know, you want me to code for Netflix, I can give you humanist code that can serve the shareholders better than the CS majors code. No doubt. But the training and the way the humanities professors talk about it, I mean really it's just that the humanities professors aren't incentivized to get in front of the CEOs and put their foot in the door. The engineering professors spend half their time talking to the CEOs about hire my kid, hire my kid, hire my kid. And that's just a difference of culture. Because the humanities professor has always thought of themselves as setting apart from society I'm gonna step back and have a cup of tea and think about this whole situation. Doesn't mean that they're incapable of telling you anything that's market driven or extremely useful or extremely functional about how to improve your work right now. It especially in a world where you have cultural industries like Netflix whose entire profit model is selling stories. The humanist is the only person who can crack that nut and it's not because they're a better person, it's because they understand stories. They don't study stories in the computer science department. It's just that, you know, it's harder to see because of how we've designed our universities.