This is a radical exchange production. I am Matt Pruitt, and this is a radical exchange with Fred Turner. A A lot of us have grown up with the idea that technology is, quote, unquote, just tools. In other words, it's neither good nor bad. It has no biases of its own. It's just a set of neutral instruments that are sort of out there outside of us that are either useful, in which case great, or they're not useful, in which case who cares. The problem is that this is not quite true, and I actually think it's a very confusing and misleading way of understanding the world that we live in. Our technology reflects the politics and ideology of the people who shaped it, often decades ago. And it affects the way that we think, it affects the way we communicate, it affects the way we interact, it affects everything about our lives. So understanding the politics and ideology behind our technology is is really difficult and confusing because we have to begin the journey totally lodged inside of the very thing that we're trying to study. This is why I think it really helps to have a good map. I think of Fred Turner as one of our very best mapmakers. He is a professor of communication at Stanford and the author of several books and essays on the history of Silicon Valley, on computing, on American media and democracy that are truly essential reading. I think that we have no better tour guide as to the political, social, and ideological processes that shaped the technological world we find ourselves in. This conversation centers on the relationship between media and democracy. It was a ton of fun. I hope you enjoy it. My name is Matt Pruitt. Thanks.

Sure. So I had a very modest career as a freelancer in Boston for about ten years, 1986 to 1996, right before the Internet hit. And, you know, most of what I did was kind of cultural reporting, reviewing. It was a time when you can still get paid for book reviews and essays and things. I also did a fair amount of hard news reporting. And I got frustrated doing that work because I felt like I didn't have the space or the audience to really address the kinds of issues that I thought were were actually driving change. You know, when you when you're working as a journalist, you need to fill a news hole pretty steadily, and it's actually called the news hole. Hole. And so you do a lot of kind of figuring out, okay. I've got 750 words. I need to have this kind of sourcing. I need to have this kind of story, and I need to be in this relationship to the broad story that's circulating out there. You do a lot of that kind of matching. And, you know, I had this experience in in 1989 where I was covering the Chinese students in America during the Tiananmen Square events, and it was a very intense story. I covered it for about six weeks. There was a very intense support movement in America among Chinese students. I got very involved with it emotionally. And the night of the crackdown, the night that the Chinese government sent troops into the square, I was sitting with a group of folks at Harvard watching events unfold on the television. And, you know, I I was really pained and amazed, and I had this sense that I was watching a kind of really deep Chinese cultural story about people going into the square and about the fear that the peasants might rise up, but nothing in in the journalistic world had given me space to write about that. And the next morning, I woke up and my editor called me and said, well, you know, that story is done. What else you got in the hopper? And I just realized, wait a minute. This is the wrong rhythm for me. I realized that I had gotten really good as a journalist at sort of, you know, think about it as sailing. Right? Following the chop on the surface of the water. I could see when stories were blowing down my way. I knew how to catch them. I knew how to ride them, you know, really important skills. But I also always knew and particularly knew after Tiananmen that there were these kind of very deep, low, slow cultural currents that were driving some of the changes I was seeing up on top. And journalism didn't give me the space to write that stuff. And I realized after a while that sort of '89 was what it hit me first, but I realized after that that I really wanted to be an oceanographer. I didn't wanna be a sailor anymore. And so the first thing I did was I I actually tried to stay out of school. I'm a child of of two professors, and so I tried really hard to stay out of the university system. And I wrote a book about how Americans remember the Vietnam War. And, that was a really interesting experience. It's a fairly scholarly book as it turns out with footnotes for each chapter. And, you know, scholarly books about cultural memory maybe don't sell what you need to if you're gonna make a living as a book writer. So, by the time I was done with that, I realized, wait a minute. I'm teaching part time to support the book writing. I'm writing a book with footnotes. My life is looking like a professor's life, but I don't have a PhD. Mhmm. And so I went back to school at the University of California, San Diego, and I arrived there just about the same time the Internet hit. And it was an incredible time. I learned a ton. And ever since then, I've been doing the kind of work that you know best.

do you think it has a sort of privileged causal role in history? Or do you think it's one of many things? It's a it's a great question. I think that stories have a causal role, and I think we've tended to underestimate that. And I think that the architecture with which we display and circulate our stories matters much more than traditional historians give it credit for. I hadn't thought it through that thoroughly when I made the choice for communication. You know, I had a very good piece of advice from a from a historian in Boston who said, look. Don't go to a PhD program for the school or or even necessarily the field. Go for the people you wanna work with. And San Diego UC San Diego in communication had a group of essentially refugee cultural sociologists and historians who were amazing. This is Michael Schudson, Chandra Mukherjee. And I went and studied with them, Robert Horwitz, Jeff Bowker, Lee Starr, just an incredible group of people. And I was able to study with them, and and they really strengthened, I I think, my thinking. But especially now, you know, I I do find myself thinking about what the engines of history are. And I've I've been enormously frustrated that I think as in journalism, most American historians, not all, but but many and too many in my view, see history as what, you know, Jill Lepore called telling stories to make an argument. And the problem with that is that when you tell a story to make an argument rather than simply make an argument, you need characters. And as soon as you have a character, you need a beginning and a middle and an end. And the next thing you know, you're asking reality to confirm to narrative structures that are artificial, generic, and problematic. This is what used to happen to me as a journalist. When I was a journalist, I used to need to fill genres. Right? I I knew what a news story was. I knew what a feature story was. I knew what their parts were, and I knew how to fill those parts. I became essentially an industrial supplier of intellectual goods. And I see an awful lot of that kind of industrial supply model in traditional American history, and it's not what I wanted to do. The other place I looked when I was thinking about coming into school was American studies, and I still very much think of myself as an American studies person. And American studies is a field that emerges post World War two. It has a a legacy in that moment of, you know, being, I think, very white folks oriented in a way that remains an enormous problem. By the time I was looking at it as a field, I had a lot of the interests that were in the field, but the positions that were available, the jobs that were available in the field were few, and they were oriented predominantly around ethnic studies departments. That wasn't what I was gonna do, and I knew that. And so I didn't wanna be in American studies, but I still think of myself as an American studies scholar. The other field that I found very congenial is art history. Folks in art history know more about the visual life, particularly of our society, than than most any other field. Unfortunately, from my perspective, like regular history, like, from traditional history, art history tends to be very concerned with preserving its standing as a field. And one of the things that I love about communication as a field is that it doesn't stand on status, and it can't. You know, when I got a job in the communication department here at Stanford, a relative who will go unnamed said the snarkiest thing. She said, oh, communication, the major of cheerleaders everywhere. Well, you know, it is actually America's largest major, but it's a major where the questions are what drive the field. And I love that. I love that about it. And we hire from all different fields. We are open to all different kinds of questions. And frankly, I think we've got our our hands on a set of social phenomena that we are increasingly recognizing as absolutely central to the future of our democracy and our society. And it's a field that other fields have just ignored. You know, if you if you go I'll rant for another two seconds. If you go to traditional American history very frequently, you look at the twentieth century, many, not all, but many American historians who are not focused on media will say, you know, what happened in the twentieth century? Well, Roosevelt, the New Deal. Great. Super important. Don't disagree. But what about cinema? What about the radio? The entire architecture of our public discussion was transformed in about a lifetime and a half. And how that happened, why that happened, and what happened when it did is not a question that animates most American historians. And that baffles me. And it is a question that animates an awful lot of folks in communication. So I feel very much at home here. I feel very free. I feel like I'm able to work on important things, and I'm able to be in touch with the living world of media makers and technologists in a way that I think keeps my scholarship a little bit more relevant than it might be otherwise. Gotcha.

or kind of a breakdown in in our public conversation. I'm happy to give it to try to tackle that. And, also, I just want to acknowledge there's a lot of people working on it who've done some very, very good work, and I'll try to name them as I go through, but I I'm sure I'll miss them. Marcia Gessen, How Democracies Die, Nate Persily here at Stanford, Yochai Benkler and his group at Harvard have all done really important work. I actually think there are two forces in play. One is transformations in media architecture, and then the other is a concerted, deliberate effort by the Republican Party to take power in anti democratic ways. And I think we've been a little bit afraid to call out that second part and blamed the first part a little bit more. So starting in the eighties, and this is this is a lot of what I'm working on now, there was a transformation in the media world. We had the rise of cable television. We had an explosion of cable television stations. We saw the emergence of twenty four seven media. We saw the miniaturization of media. We saw suddenly that you had Sony Walkmans that you could carry around. You had VCRs. You had time shifting. We entered a world in which media was omnipresent and omnifractured. And there were bits of that before, in the twenties especially, but but nothing quite like that. Until that time, especially through the sixties, media had really been centralized, and there were gatekeepers. And and those of us in media studies were trained to question the gatekeepers and challenge them and to argue for the emergence of the kind of world that we see in the 1980, you know, a world in which there are many voices, a a plethora of voices, and it's all going to to free us up to have the kinds of discussions that a democracy needs to have, not so much. The fracturing has a couple of effects. One effect is that it actually promotes conglomeration at the corporate level. So you end up with a situation of highly centralized ownership and highly decentralized media, which is a really weird combination and one that has a series of effects in the eighties and later. The other thing that you do is you create the ability for folks, particularly on the right and from disenfranchised communities, evangelical communities, far right communities, to gain a foothold in the media sphere unlike any they've really had before. So the right, and I'm thinking now particularly of, you know, the far right, the racist right, the Ku Klux Klan right, were on the radio in the twenties and thirties. You know, father Coughlin was on the radio advocating the protocols to the elders of Zion, proto Nazi fake news tract in the nineteen thirties, and he had 6,000,000 listeners, I believe, every week. You know, so so that's been around a while. But in the eighties, cable television sucks the financial energy out of a whole series of media, and the deregulation of media makes it possible and profitable for smallholders, for religious folks, for others who can't pay a lot of money to get on the radio and spend a lot of time there. Regulators also drop the requirement that a given radio station allow for the right of response for different views. And so suddenly, you get radio stations and cable stations who promote only a single view. And that single view, that religious broadcasting station that or to some degree later, the left broadcasting stations, those single view stations become places where you can tune in and inhabit and live your life. So what I'm trying to say is that the fractures we associate now with the Internet were actually born, I think, in the eighties. And that they're not actually Internet fractures. They're cultural fractures. They're media architecture fractures that occur before the net does. The net builds on those and exacerbates those. The other thing that the net does, financial incentives. The The financial incentives that we associate with the Internet for stickiness, say, where Facebook promotes controversy to keep people on the site so that they can continue to monitor people on the site and then sell the data that they collect. That model also emerges in the eighties with cable television. It's not actually an Internet model primarily. And that model is super powerful, and it has a kind of acceleration effect. Right? I mean, each new controversy demands another new controversy, demands another new controversy. And so we push the, you know, what folks on the right like to call the Overton window, the the limit of what's discussable out farther and farther and farther and farther out. And sometimes, I think this has extraordinary benevolent effects. You know, I I'm really struck, for example, you know, gay rights. We've been able to talk about queer culture in my lifetime in a way that's completely different than it was when I was a child. Just astonishing because in part, gay people have been visible in the media. I use that as only one example. There are many others. But at the same time, it's given voice and credibility to bad actors and to actors on all sides for whom the incentive is to ratchet up the heat. And you can see this in a lot of different industries. You can see it in politics, and it's one of the things that's corroding our politics. You can also see it in in porn. I'm astonished. It was just sort of out there and just sort of available. Just mind blowing. Again, stuff that was very hard to find back in the day. Certainly, when I was a, you know, a a 13 year old, if you found a copy of Playboy, it was like, oh my god. You've been shown something completely alien and wild and risque and dangerous and off the charts. You know? Yeah. I don't think that would hold for any 13 year old today. So all those forces are in play. The other force that I wanna mention before I come back to the Republicans is just the the integration of the media ecosystem. We often talk about fracturing. The fracturing is incredibly important, but the fracturing allows for individual actors to seed a media stream that then travels across many platforms. Trump is a master of this. One incredibly crazy tweet done on the platform Twitter travels almost instantly through a media ecosystem that depends on controversy. So suddenly, you know, CNN reports it, MSNBC gets cranky about it, Fox defends it. And the next thing you know, reality has been centered around this crazy tweet from Donald Trump. And so so integration really matters. The last thing I wanna say is just that the Republicans in congress, particularly since Trump, but starting much earlier with Gingrich in the nineties, have launched a series of efforts that are genuinely corrosive to our democracy. And so, you know, if the media system is extraordinarily damaging, but it's not damaging in a context where everyone is seeking democracy.

Complete sense. I think you've got your finger on, one of the great fallacies that accompany the rise of the Internet. And and the great fallacy was that democracy depends on collective conversation. And that fallacy accompanies a vision of democracy as direct democracy, that we should have direct input. We should, you know, always be able to any decision, we should all be able to vote on it completely and instantly. What we have in America, what I think works much better, is representative democracy. And what makes democracy what has made democracy work are a series of intermediary institutions that provide checks and balances and that provide the kind of disinterested publicness that you mentioned earlier. I completely agree that centralized media without checks and balances are a disaster. You know, one quick look at Soviet Russia or, you know, mid century Germany, and you'll see exactly where that goes. However, a system where there are checks and balances, where people get called out for going too far one way or the other, can be enormously valuable. And I think we actually had that with all kinds of problems, but we had that in the sixties in The United States. It's one of the reasons that we were able to see things like the Democratic National Convention in 1968 and the violence there, or we were able to see the violence in Birmingham. We were able to see and and support civil rights movements in part because even mainstream media run by white people who were wealthy and in centers of power felt obliged to cover these self self evidently civic and publicly important ideas. Now what held their feet to the fire? Couple of things. One thing that I know from experience is the newsroom. If you're working in a newspaper and you're in a newsroom and you do something stupid, you have to walk through the newsroom and people laugh at you. And the newsroom is an institution, people have jobs, that enforce norms of disinterested publicness. Did you serve the public or did you serve your source? Did you serve yourself? Did you serve the public? You'll get called out if you did did the wrong thing. At a larger scale, you know, certainly during the the mass media era of the sixties and seventies, universities served as in part a check on mainstream media. They called it out when Walter Cronkite got it wrong. They protested when he couldn't cover the war. So what I'm trying to say is that a disinterested public sphere has a series of intermediary institutions from between the individual and the state, between the individual and the mass media organization that convey and manage the individual's views up the chain and down the chain and enforce norms of publicness that make it disinterested. The problem with direct democracy and the conversation model is that we're always ourselves in that space. Right? And this is a deep cultural American ideal. It's a real mistake that we should always be ourselves twenty four seven and in public. Right? You know? No. You don't wanna know parts of me. I don't wanna know parts of you. I wanna talk with you about politics. I wanna break that off and be public together, be citizens together. I don't you know, we're not never do the other stuff. And so that ability to be citizens together is not the conversational model. Being a citizen depends on having institutions that you can be a member of, that will chastise you if you get it wrong and cease to be public, that will keep you disinterested. And one of the things that I think we're living through right now is a fantasy that by connecting everyone, and this is Mark Zuckerberg's fantasy, we'll just have a global conversation, and government will emerge from within. Now that's a deep fantasy in the computer science world, and we could talk about that. But I I think it's just exactly the wrong way to have a democratic society.

in a public minded way. Right. Right? Yep. And that's and that's that's I think you put your finger on the structure that characterizes our moment. I think our moment is characterized by super centralization at the high level, radical inequality, and then radical individuation at the daily level. I often think that Facebook is like Walmart. Right? I mean, I can buy anything I want, and my desires are my own, but I'm operating within a building and a set of choices that have been completely structured for me. And it's that it's that weird parallel. Right? It's like Facebook is like, you know, it's like a chain store. It's like a big box store for communication.

Different thoughts there. The first one, I wanna stop using the metaphor of a conversation. I think that a political conversation, that that metaphor takes us sideways because it makes it seem like we're operating on equal planes as though we are in fact in an eighteenth century coffee shop and able to debate and then see the results of our debate turn into action. And I don't think that works. The thing that I think is most important, and I think this is suggested by your thoughts about organizing users, is institutional. We need institutions that are strong enough and public oriented enough to go up against other institutions. You know, Facebook is a company that exists in two ways. It exists on the one hand as a collection of users who are its laborers, and on the other hand, it exists as a contractually oriented legal entity built around a shares, b shares, c shares that lives by permission of the state, which represents the will of the American people. And we can absolutely intervene at the state level. You see Germany doing this very effectively now with their privacy laws. And privacy laws may apply only in Germany, but they can affect Facebook around the world. So I think the state has a major role and will ultimately, under the correct administration, play that role. In the meantime, though, my view on organizing is that the people who need to be organized are the Facebook workers and particularly the engineers. I think that if we go to users, who I agree are laborers, I think that the challenge there is that most folks who use Facebook, as far as I can tell, don't think of what they're doing as labor and on the contrary, see their Facebook site as a place at which they do things that are necessary to their own survival, make friends, make networks, display their skills and interests, all of which are really important in a radically individuated world like the one we inhabit. And so I think that, yes, they are laborers, but were they to recognize that, they would have to kind of cut off their nose to spite their faces. They would have to stop seeking some of the the social goods that they are seeking in Facebook. And the horror of Facebook is that they've managed to capture these very necessary, very human, very the center of our social beings and monetize it in ways that are very hard to challenge precisely because our social beings are involved. On the other hand, I do see unions beginning to get a toehold in Silicon Valley. You know, Kickstarter, a major effort to unionize. The Tech Workers Coalition here in Silicon Valley is working. And I think that if you get a group of organized engineers, because engineers are the rarest commodity and and good engineers are the hardest commodity to find and the thing on which Facebook success ultimately depends. That's where you can apply some leverage. I think that that's the leverage point. Would I like in the meantime for users to understand themselves as laborers? Absolutely. And that's a lot of what my teaching is about. That's what I try to convey in class. Yeah. It seems to me that actually a lot of the history of capitalism can be understood

Right? But I but I'm And I pause on that because I agree with you right there. I've been trying to think of older examples, and I one of the things that I wonder in our conversation at this point is, was it easier for Marx to recognize labor in his day because people were doing it with their bodies and hammers and machines and could be seen and had to go to the place than it is for us who are laboring

Interesting. So what do you propose as an alternative? This is this is fast, David. Well, I think what that means is to to govern increasing returns processes,

are not being captured by some small I I I love this. I think we have a challenge and that so I I sympathize with the way in which you've characterized two institutionalized representatives of the public, whether that's the state or labor unions, and I like both of those. I've been struck by how within Silicon Valley, in big firms, there's actually an effort going on inside the companies to construct a vision of the public and to enlist their workers in inhabiting it. So So I spent a lot of time inside Facebook's headquarters, and I was there for totally other reasons. But while I was there, I saw, their art collection. And Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park are lined with art, and the art is made on the walls. And most of it, believe it or not, is street art. It looks like graffiti. Beautifully done. I mean, really, really gorgeous art, but it makes the inside of Facebook headquarters look like a public sphere. And inside the headquarters, there's there's also a a set of posters produced by Facebook itself, the analog research laboratory within Facebook that says things like be open, you know, share. These are motivational posters that are around the company. What it starts to look like inside Facebook is like you're in the world, but that world is built for you. But you're encouraged also through a variety of Facebook HR policies, and I've written about this at length. It's on my website. You can find it. That you're encouraged to imagine yourself as the citizen of a public sphere and to imagine coding for Facebook as building a new and better public sphere. So the workers of Facebook are being taught that, and I don't think this is true, but they're being taught that the world of government and unions is old school, old hat industry. And they, with their brilliant minds and typing fingers, are going to build a new, individuated, flexible society in which we can all be just who we are as individuals. And I think that's a nightmare. I I think that's the Walmart mind. I think the Walmart mind is the mind that says, I bring you supplies from around the world so you can be the individual that you want to be. Never mind the cost to workers. Never mind the cost to suppliers. Never mind the cost. And I do think it's a challenge in the short term to help folks inside these companies relearn the fact that building information systems

Yeah.

Right? And they they focused on that instead of focusing on the dimension of power and control. Right. I I think there's a couple dimensions of what you're saying that are that are especially important. One is that, you know, the Playa when you and I've been out three times. When you go to the Playa for Burning Man, you see that, in fact, the city built by its inhabitants has a second layer to it, which is the state police, the park police, the Yeah. Core group of burners who build the city infrastructure every year. There's actually a a jail on the Playa. It's just not easy to see from within the city. And where I'm going with this is that folks who go to the Playa have to ignore or at least not think much about the fact that they're subsidized in their pleasures by this infrastructure. And that's also a very sort of Google Facebook model. Right? You you're just online doing your thing. You don't pause to think about the ways that you're subsidized by these giant server farms that, you know, eat our energy and pollute the earth and and on down that pipe. So subsidy is key, and subsidy is not something people think about. I think the other thing, and I I'd be curious to see where this fits in your model of the kind of expanding value, expanding wealth model, is desire. I was really struck at Burning Man by how how much it's sort of a theater of desire. And, you know, people get together, they make art, they collaborate, and they are desiring to share with one another, to build something with one another, to be seen. And those desires spill spill over in all kinds of directions. They spill over into dancing. They spill over into sexuality. They spill over in lots of ways. And I guess I kinda wonder, what are the promises of this non institutionalized vision of the public? One of the promises of the art at Facebook, for example, is that you can live in a world built around desire, not around rules. How do we make sense of that tension in the model that you're laying out? Because it's a problem. I'm curious about it.

to a certain degree for better or worse. And there are movements against that structuring of desire Mhmm. For very good reasons. And then the pendulum can swing back the other way, and you realize that desires need to be structured in in some ways because sometimes people have desires that are corrosive to other people and so on. You know? I don't have I don't have an answer for it. You know, I I often think about so so the for folks who may not know, the last book I did started in the late thirties, early forties, and I spent a lot of time looking at fascist media. And it was clear to me that, you know, in fascist media, desire has been really carefully organized, industrialized, and transformed into fascism. And at Burning Man, I see something that looks on the face of it like the opposite. Everybody's free to run around, be who they are, express themselves as they are interiorly. But I I've come to worry over time that that search for free desire expression in a world of Walmarts, in a world of Facebooks, creates the conditions for a kind of new centralization that we haven't really got a language for yet, and it terrifies me. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I I'm on the same page because I think that this actually is kind of the same point that I'm trying to make about data. Because, for example, this idea that each individual should have absolute control over their own data kind of falls apart when you realize that if I expose all of my data, I expose some of your data. Right. So if if everyone if everyone has absolute control over their own data, none of us do. And I think it's kinda the same with desire. And what we need to do is we need to negotiate these inherent concepts. I think you you your inner your inner John Dewey is showing here, which is great. You know, so the thing that I always loved about Dewey was that he saw that people were never alone. You know? We were never islands. We were always connected to one another. We live in archipelagos, and what you do is what I do. We do these things together. And he he began to kind of cultivate a language for that, and I really, really value that. I think that that's one of the things that we need to return to our moment. Now there's a challenge here, and the challenge is a historical one. It's been on my mind a lot. When you look at the last hundred and fifty, two hundred years, you see that many of the systems that we had for organizing desire and coordinating it in relation to, say, production have really changed. The church is the biggest. You know, we've become a much more secular world over the last hundred, hundred and fifty years. And however you feel about religion, religion was one of the ways in which desire could be modulated, coordinated, ritualized, and organized in ways that were not corrosive to society depending on your point of view, but rather sustaining. I think one of the things that we see on the right right now in America, which also scares me, is a kind of desperate desire to return to, I think, a frequently very conservative vision of what religious life might be like in a kind of desperate hope to find a desire structuring set of institutions that will keep people organized and safe. And I don't think it's gonna work, but I do think one of the things that's incumbent on those of us who celebrate a more rights oriented and diverse America is to imagine what are the desire structuring institutions we can create? What can we make? Where are the values for that? And, ironically, I think one of the things happening right now at Google and Facebook is that they are at least saying to their employees, oh, we've got that covered. You know, we're the place. Look. You know, we're gonna make the future here together, and we're gonna bring the barber and the dentist to you because you're that valuable. We're going to center our company around you, and you're going to center your work around building a new public in the image of our company, which is centered around you, so it's all good. And the next thing you know, you're in this kind of weirdly narcissistic moment that makes it possible to elect a Donald Trump. Yuck. Sorry. That was a little fast, but you see where I'm going.

influence and discourse and relationship. I love that. Let's let's pause on that. I think you just said something really important. I wanna pause on it. The idea that our individual selves are literally incoherent if they are not integrated with and engaged with other selves. I just think that's an incredibly important idea that our society tends to underplay. I also wanna note that the world that I kind of grew up inhabiting, sort of, you know, post hippie white America, is a world that tends to think that that kind of collaboration can only occur in the intimate space. Right? That that it's about your relationships. It's about your friendships. It's about this thing that we're gonna call community. I love all those things, but I think that you've been pointing to something equally important, which theorists in the nineteenth century also got, which is the power of collaboration in structured settings. You know, voting together is very powerful. Negotiating from within rule based institutions is very powerful. And I think it's especially powerful because it forces you to confront people who are not like yourself and to build coalitions across difference. I think that's incredibly important. One of the things that torments me in our moment is how difficult it's become to have conversations with people who believe things that are very different than what you believe. And Right. I think you can only have those conversations in places that are structured

because it leads to the to just an awareness that, you know, somebody who believes something that I find abhorrent, they didn't come up with it in a vacuum. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. And this this is, I think, also a particular challenge for those of us on the sort of secular left. You know, if you're at least in a Protestant or Catholic church, you become part of a community of believers, and you have a structure right there. And I a lot of the right now has members who are believers, who are churched, who have a structure where they see connection to one another across difference through religion. The secular left is busy, I think, arguing that we need to recognize difference, which I totally agree, and recognize the consequences of bias and prejudice, which I totally agree. And yet, have we begun to propose anything as powerful as the idea of God or the practice of weekly religion that can keep us coherent across our differences? What have we got? And I I think that's just a challenge on the left. I don't think we've got a good answer yet, and I think that's hard for folks on the right who are religious to comprehend. I mean, why would you join what looks like a chaotic hyper individualized

for the following thing, the school didn't expel the offending kid. They put them together and facilitated the interaction where some, like, understanding arose. And, I mean, I just think we need a lot more. I I really agree. Let me pause and just note the the the structural conditions under which that takes place. So I've actually thought a lot about restorative justice, and one of the things that has struck me about it is that it it in The United States anyways, it only really occurs in highly juridical settings or highly religious ones. So juridical settings, you just described really nicely. You know, the the juridical process that results in someone being convicted of a crime, and depending on the will of the victim, they are able to encounter one another with the help of a therapist and to come perhaps to some resolution that may or may not obviate punishment. You know, punishment may still occur, and so it's not clear. You know, the church different churches have had processes for this for a long time, confession in the Catholic church, you know, other kinds of confession in in other Protestant churches. And I'm intrigued by that. I like that idea. I wanna think about other places where we can negotiate conflict and difference and value systems that can underlie that. Unions have been one. I think unions have been a very powerful place, and still probably are. I'm not sure where else. Right? But that combination of civic structure and intense personal presence for the negotiation of difference, something in there is what we need to be doing. I get concerned that we don't really have a a set of principles on the left that are as strong and coherent as the religious beliefs of many on the right are. And that's hard. Right? It takes a plan to beat a plan. And it's hard if the folks that you think might wanna constrain rights have a really coherent set of beliefs, and they're going up against a very diverse, flexible, individuated set of beliefs. I don't know how to solve that problem. It's been bothering me quite a lot. Yeah. I mean, I think that the desire to just to sortate this kind of thing is orthogonal to left right. Okay. That's good. No. That's good. I like that. That's helpful. Then I think it's true. I think it's true. And that gives me, if it's not true, we're in big troubles, put it that way. Yeah. But that gives me hope too because and I think that you've just hit on another pretty important principle, which is looking for the places where things are orthogonal to left right. Yeah. There are plenty of them, I think. Yeah. There are plenty of them. You know? And those are the places where reconciliation can happen. That's nice. I like that. I really I also really like the idea of identifying reconciliation pools, you know, pools of social process, of belief, of location where people can gather and do differences. You know, in my youth, I used to work in a seven Eleven and I worked in a diner, and those were places you know, both of those were places where people with very different beliefs could gather and hang out. They were the I forgot the name of the sociologist, but they were the the clean, well lighted place. They were the great third place. They were that place. I'd like to find third places for reconciliation in our society. That'd be great. I don't think the Internet's ever going to be one.

this was something I hadn't known anything about until I did did my last book. The last book was called The Democratic Surround, and it was about multimedia environments in the forties and fifties, which is not a time that we think about them existing. And the fact that many of them were designed for the purpose of democratizing the perceptions of viewers. These are particularly museum exhibitions, but there were other things as well. So Gestalt figures into this in a sort of fascinating way. We'll go back to America in the thirties and forties and fifties also. And America has just discovered Freud. Freud came over, visited, gave a series of lectures. American psychology has suddenly turned Freudian. There's an unconscious, oh, my God, maybe there are things I can't control. Maybe my reason can be penetrated by, say, fascist film, and I can be caused to become obedient to fascists. So a lot of fear there. The other European tradition that's in competition with that at that moment is the tradition of Gestalt psychology in the American version of which there's a hope that we move through the world having a variety of experiences, and we knit them together into a picture of the world that is simultaneously coherent and uniquely our own. So I am a whole person because I have a gestalt. I have a picture of the world that is put together from things that I've experienced that perhaps you have not, though there might be overlaps. And so putting together the gestalt is how you make a person. And it's critical in this period, according to American intellectuals and journalists, that people have a democratic gestalt, that is, that they be independent, that they know who they are, that they be in charge of taking the images and sounds around them and making them their own, and that they be respectful and tolerant and embracing of others who are different from themselves. And the idea at the time, especially in the 40s and 50s, mostly led by a group associated with Margaret Mead and Gregory Bates in a group called the Committee for National Morale. The idea was that you could produce a democratic gestalt in a person by surrounding them with a variety of images or a variety of sounds, any one of which they could look at one at a time, but none of which overwhelmed them. Rather, they would be able to seek among these images or seek among these sounds, find the ones that were meaningful to them, and build their own sense of self, their own gestalt from the experience. And this was very self consciously distinguished from fascist media and surrealism, both of which were oriented toward creating super immersive environments from which there was no escape. So the kind of democratic surround I've talked about had, you know, pictures on the wall, but there was always space between the pictures in which you were thought to be able to recover yourself, recover your attention. Fascist environments, all pictures everywhere. Surrealist environments, all pictures everywhere. And by the way, while we're on it, that fan of Adolf Hitler, Walt Disney, who was a fan of Adolf Hitler, though that's not widely known, very much believed in the fascist model of total immersion. He very much hoped that his theme parks would be totally immersive and designed totally immersive three sixty degree films designed to stop people from thinking and have them bond together in a swaying mass. We can talk about that. But the democratic model, the democratic surround aim to build an individual gestalt and to allow us to build those for ourselves. So I guess I have a couple questions, couple Sure. Branches off of that that I'd like to ask you about. One is assuming that you

we take data and spin them into a narrative, we can sort of make the facts fit our desired narrative. Mhmm. Does that make sense? Yeah. So so let me just start by saying that I that I I actually don't think that the democratic surround folks were correct and that I and that I actually see them you know, I admired their effort to come up with an antifascist medium form in the forties and fifties. I think that was an important thing to do at a moment when Hitler was centralizing media, American industry was centralizing media. They came up with a decentralized model that was important and interesting at that moment. But I actually see them as the beginning of the problem that we inhabit now, the problem of the belief that all we have to do is get our individual gestalts together and society will take shape around us. They really thought that Margaret Mead actually wrote in a book called And Keep Your Powder Dry, which was about how to fight the Nazis. She said, you basically what you have to do is strengthen your inner psyche because the individual mind, the individual soul, is the essence of resistance to fascism. So the irony, I think, is that at that moment when that might have been true, she reset the sort of terms of democracy and people around her did to become gestalt oriented, psychology oriented. That sets the stage for the sixties when I'm just going to find myself and in finding myself make a new America. This is how we get to the communes. And that's how we get to Facebook, where we're just going to connect a whole slew of individuals and we'll all be happy and democracy will emerge. It's the cybernetic vision. And I just think it's deeply wrong. So I don't square it with that. But then how do you draw a normative distinction between that view of media and the Walt Disney view of media? Great. Yeah, I do. Absolutely. So a couple of different ways. The first is that I note one of the things that I do, and it's I don't know if it's a trick or not, is that I get very specific about the historical moment in play. So when Mead and Bateson are working in the forties, I'm very aware that there's a lot of stuff they can't see. And I see them working super hard with the Committee for National Morale to bolster the things that I do value, democratic institutions, collaborative resource negotiation, the sort of way that we would want the world to be. And I see them trying to empower individuals to be good citizens in that space. Now, do I agree with how they did it or that it worked? No. Do I agree that perception and media are the key to citizenship? It's more complicated than that. But I really appreciate the effort. Disney, by contrast, you know, so I'm thinking now of 1959, there's the American exhibition in Moscow, and virtually every American corporation sent some kind of display. Disney built a three sixty degree film. I think it was for the Moscow exhibition. Three sixty degree film in which he measured the film's effectiveness by the degree to which the audience was swaying in unison. Swaying in unison is exactly what Nazi marches are. They are the moment when you stop reasoning, you stopped being a citizen, and you started being a frond, a palm frond. You started being a blade of grass swaying in a lawn that is mowed by somebody much bigger and more important than you. So what I see with Disney is an effort to give pleasure, but it's the pleasure of submission, the pleasure of melting into the mass, of becoming a stick in the fasci. And that's awful. And I don't see that in in the Mead and the Bateson. On the contrary, I see them trying to individuate in ways that grant people reason and agency of a kind that do undergird citizenship.

I don't disagree with Dworkin in that setting. I think I wanna distinguish between two conditions of information reception, and I'm not sure which one Dwork is writing toward in in that example. One is the sort of the fantasy of cybernetic mastery. You know? So certainly since the fifties, there has been a hope in certain technocratic circles and in the government of Chile that we could build cybernetic systems, gather all the information in our country, and then through the cybernetic systems, change society. So Chile actually built or built most of the systems called Cybersigned, built in the early seventies, and it was designed to be literally like a Star Trek Enterprise kind of command center where the president and his team could look at screens and get information from around the country, have it all inputted and then make the best decisions for the country to be implemented through commands sent out through that system. And And that I think is a is a technocratic vision. And I don't care for that vision. I think it's a problem. I do think it's one that Mark Zuckerberg has, but I think it's a problem. The other condition is the democratic surround condition in which I think we find ourselves now. We sort of find ourselves in a new version of it. The democratic surround condition, you know, like at the exhibition, The Family of Man, is finding yourself slapped upside the head with pictures from around the world of stuff that you've never encountered on your own and have to make sense of. And my world through media is so much larger than my world that's in my body in my house. I see things from all over the place. I see kinds of people I might never have imagined existed. I encounter religious beliefs that are just completely alien to anything I was raised with. I happen to love it, but I could see that that's a challenge. And I actually think that it's almost a generational challenge for us now to learn how to be citizens and to make coherent gestalts out of this incredibly diverse and growingly diverse, increasingly diverse set of images and sounds around us. And precisely not to settle for either the fantasy of technocratic control or the fantasy of immersive submission to somebody who tells us coherent stories like a dictator or a Walt

Mhmm. Say more. That's interesting.

doesn't I mean, he he he uses the language control through communication. But by control, I've often thought that he means the making of order as distinct from top down hierarchical control in the sense that we might understand it. Now for him, those things might not have ever been distinguished. You know, he was part of an elite. He's at MIT. You know, he's fancy. And, of course, like many of the people around him, he probably believes that there are elites that should govern the world because they have special knowledge and cybernetics might be a technique by which they could do that. But I've always been struck that Wiener's vision of the world is more like Frederick Hayek's. You know, it's a world in which there's a bounded set of something somewhere within which we're all free to bounce around as we like. And I don't think of Dewey as ever having embraced the boundary. I think of Dewey as having always celebrated just the playful interaction. You know, Dewey always struck me as somebody going from, like, bar to bar listening to different bands and seeing how they interacted.

if you don't have a boundary, then you can't control everything, right? It's always going to be flowing in and out of some other system. And Let's just spend a minute on that idea of always flowing, right? I think one of the things that we see now in our contemporary debates is a desperate longing for boundaries. And we saw this again in the mid century, in the twentieth century. It's one of the things that gave rise to fascism. You know, Adorno would later call it the authoritarian personality. It's the search for boundaries, for containment, for order. And I do think there's a challenge in American life generally. And Dewey is right at the heart of it. And the challenge is something like how might we live in a world of constant flow in which things could not be controlled, in which things could not be bounded in that way, but in which things were always already changing? It's almost Buddhist vision of the world. And I I think Norbert Wiener's answer to that question was through computers. We can build information systems that will allow us to exchange information in real time and so play with one another and move forward. I don't think that's a very effective answer. I think it's been manipulated by commercial interests. But I still think the question's a good one, and I think it's left over from doing it. I don't have an answer to it. Yeah. I think the idea of computers

just got people thinking about how to compute every variable and how, you know, how to look at things as closed systems and control them. Do you have thoughts about that I do. Yeah. Chicken or egg question? Yeah. The chicken or egg question. So, again, I can do it at the moment of, you know, the late forties, early fifties. So the first digital computer is is invented and and put online in 1948. And, you know, it's in the early fifties that computers start to really travel through industry. They go to the insurance industry. They're in the military, and they are seen as prototypes of social organization. Ironically, they're often seen as militarized in that period, and Wiener was sort of an outlier. So Time magazine has a picture of an IBM computer in this period that's just a big box with a military officer's hat on it and arms. And so it looks like a sort of a General MacArthur, but as a machine, and people are terribly afraid that it's going to command and control them. You know, technologies are frequently prototypes for social order. When the Internet came along, it was held up as an emblem of a new kind of rhizomatic social world we were entering would turn out that to be true. So I do think that's right. But I think that the risk that we probably couldn't see, that Dewey might have seen, is that the the sort of prototype technologies like computers give us a vision of a world and a fantasy of a world as symbols. But then as technologies, they connect us to already existing institutions that make those kinds of worlds and achieving them very difficult to get to. Wait. I'm not sure I quite followed that. Can you take me to that one more time? So if you think about computing in Wiener's era, computers are symbols of bounded reasonable systems. Within the computer, everything is information. It's controlled and orderly. It produces nice outputs. And we, as human beings are thought to look just like those computers. We too are information processors. And as we seek to move through the world, we get feedback and we change our behavior accordingly. And order emerges in the world just as it does inside a computer. And it's a very benevolent, ordered, peaceful system. And taken as a kind of literary act, a sort of story that includes just computers and people. It sounds great, right? Like this is the origin of the poem, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, Brautigan. So Brautigan's poem, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, fantasizes a world in which we live in a cybernetic meadow, watched over by machines and gently tended. Okay. So there's that. But in point of fact, the computers of Norbert Wiener's era did not stand alone. They served insurance companies, they served the military. And one of the things that I think we have a lot of difficulty thinking with our media about is the ways that they connect us to other institutions that have nothing to do with media and everything to do with controlling us. You know, when I boot up my cell phone, I see not just a technology that helps me navigate the world, but one that feeds my data to a slew of other corporations. And we need to be thinking about that as well. So the fantasy that a prototypical technology will enable us to live inside of an eminently bounded world is great, but it doesn't work because the technology is already always connecting us to institutions that work different from the fantasy. It's been sort of nice to talk about the principles that underlie some of the contemporary troubles. You know, I think we've both got our eye on a kind of structural change that I see beginning in the early fifties and that we're really living in a sort of turbulent downflow of. And I think that's super important. I don't know what to do, and I would welcome your thoughts on this. I just don't know what to do with the fact that I see that trajectory bubbling through cybernetics, the corporate world, hippies, all the stuff I've written about. And I see that flowing down through time toward Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter and Facebook and the sort of new public they fantasize. Well, that's going on, though. Starting the 80s, at least, we see a new right aborning that is genuinely authoritarian, anti democratic, and out to get us. And I've been worried about the sort of cybernetic authoritarian style for a very long time. What I don't know is how to be thinking about that while also managing a kind of alt right white nationalism that is just hitting us all very hard in The US right now. I don't know how those things are connected, and I I think we need to kind of figure that out. I don't know what the answer is, but I'd be I'd welcome any thoughts you have on that. I don't know. I don't know. But,

is missing the boat. But ultimately, I don't think that it is. Otherwise, I think I think it is the boat. I think this is really important. I think that one of the challenges at a moment like this of sort of high tension and high drama is to step off stage and step away from the drama a little bit and try to ask, okay, what are the scripts here? What's being written here? I think that's really important. I also have a happy thought and maybe we should end with a happy thought. And my happy thought is that, you know, there's a guy named Ron Inglehart, who I very much admire. He's a political scientist. And for his entire career, he has studied something called the World Values Survey. And he's put together a picture of historical change that says that as societies gain wealth, people begin to seek psychological and social independence. And I think that's right. And he certainly documented it well. I think there's a corollary principle, which is that as societies mediate as as media permeates societies, people not only seek their own well-being, but seek their well-being in a world where they can suddenly see many, many others. And I think that one of the things we might be living through at a larger level is a collision between our desire to seek happiness for ourselves as we know it from the world around us, and the ways that we have to suddenly encounter very many people who are very different than us. And our opportunity here is to embrace those who are different than us and to build a new kind of society with them and to seek satisfaction in embracing difference is a kind of a wonderful thing. I do actually think that's possible. And I think that when when you think about Trump and when you think about the right wing rising in Europe, when you think about the neo authoritarians and the racists in all of our societies, maybe one way to think about them is that they're also animated precisely because the big forces in our lives are forces of psychological and social liberation. Maybe we are becoming freer and maybe we are becoming more diverse. And maybe as a result, the kinds of authority on which racists and authoritarians depend are under threat. And if that's the case, then I'm a much happier guy.

And Yeah. We will be as exciting to the future as the Brontosaurus is to us. Right.

That conversation was a real privilege for me. I'm obviously a big admirer of Fred's work. And if you found any of that interesting, you should go to Fred's website and read his essays and his books, The Democratic Surround and From Counterculture to Cyberculture. In In a space that is full of myth making, which is to say the hypercharged culture of Silicon Valley, Fred is doing indispensable sense making. It's really required reading for those of you working at technology companies, excited about technology's potential to either save or destroy the world, or those of you who have an inkling that technology is political and politics is technological. Thank you to Fred. Thank you to producers, Jennifer Marone and Leon Erickson. Thanks to Magnus Moon and Jared c Baloch for the great music, and thanks for listening.