Yeah. I was a, originally a theater director, and I got, very fed up with the, kind of the traditional three act narrative structure that everybody was was doing, the sort of crisis climax relief, you know, the need of audiences to have everything resolved by the end of the play rather than to have questions left unanswered. So that was going on. At the same time, theater was getting very expensive. I was into, like, Bertolt Brecht and going meta and, you know, all the weird stuff you could do with political theater. But, you know, I was doing a production or involved with the production of Threepenny Opera where the cheapest seat was $70. And I'm thinking, okay. So who am I reaching? What are we doing? And right around the same time, my weirdest, most psychedelic, wild eyed, future thinking friends from college were moving to San Francisco to become part of the, the digital revolution. And I I just started I was living in LA at the time and just started going up to San Francisco and seeing them. You know, they'd work at Intel during the day and then come home to Oakland at night and scrape the peyote off cactuses and trip and make fractals and project them at dead shows. And I started to think that the the Internet revolution or the digital revolution was going to be this, you know, much more populist, participatory, social, anti elitist, anti capitalist, way of expressing ourselves. So I became involved in that, wrote one of the first books about cyberculture, rave, hypertext, fantasy, role playing, the psychedelic revival, the neo pagan revival. I called it Siberia. And, it got canceled in 1992 because the publisher thought the Internet would be over by 1993 when the book was supposed to come out. They thought it would be a trend like CB radio was in The States, or people were were buying the truck the radios that truckers use to communicate. They thought it'd be a a a hobby that would disappear. But then, of course, the net happened, the book came out, and I did a few others. One one called MediaVirus, which sort of got my name on the map because then viral media happened, so I got to coin this big thing. And then by the the early nineties already, '93, '94, I was already writing about, Wired magazine and the long boom and the declaration of independence of cyberspace and how we were in danger of letting this terrific bottom up people's movement be kind of hijacked by business and financialization and the need for more surface area on the on the marketplace. And ended up writing, you know, really twenty five years of books and documentaries and talks and things about this this dynamic, this sort of struggle to keep these tools about community and autonomy and people and purpose, rather than turning these technologies on people, you know, using algorithms to find exploits in human beings, and, really, making human beings more predictable rather than giving people the tools to be more unpredictable.

I don't know if I was a techno utopian as such, but, I mean, these days, given how hot we are Optimist. Maybe. But yeah. Well, not even optimist. I believe there was a strong possibility that digital tools could help make things better. You know? And that And that that led to optimism. Yeah. Alright. Yeah. I did. That that that there was I I and I wrote about this in my very first book, that there's a window of opportunity right now. And but even in that first book, it's Siberia, the end of that book, you know, because when it got when it got postponed, Wired magazine came up in the interim. And I said, look. There's a there's a a battle going on for for contextualizing this thing between Mondo 2,000 and everything it represents, which is the sort of counterculture Berkeley magazine about the original Internet, and Wired magazine, which is trying to tell a very different story. And if we don't take, take precautions, I guess, if if we don't claim this space, if we don't understand, and we didn't, if we don't understand the the political assumptions underlying what we're doing, we are going to, lose the that that, political, progress.

prescient probably for the time. For the time. Right. It was as simple as saying, when you do a rave when you claim a public space to do a rave, that is a political act. It's not just Right. Finding some place that's free so we don't have to do it in a nightclub. It's there's something else going on that we weren't most of us weren't aware of when we were doing it. And that was really why, our movement lacked the power it could have had. Really, until Occupy, we didn't realize what that was.

Yeah. I mean, I traced it back to two to two main threads. You know, one is capitalism and the other is kind of techno techno solutionism or scientism or the the match between those two things. So, you know, with capitalism, where where do you go? You know, do you go back to the bible when Joseph told the pharaoh to, you know, turn these people into indentured indentured you know, hoard the grain and then, and then meet it out to people, for for their indenture? I mean, where do you where how far back do you go? But, the the the main thing I was looking at was on the one hand, the way this kind of the the peer to peer market economy of the late middle ages when people were selling their things to each other in markets of local currencies. It was a real it was an interesting period of great economic growth, how that was, you know, repressed by central currency and corporations, really how financialization happened. So the idea is instead of making money by creating something or doing a service and getting money from someone else, you make money off the exchange. You know, you make money, you go meta on it. So, you know, financialization, whether you're using stocks or derivatives of stocks or derivatives of derivatives, I was really looking at that as a and and that's also what led to the the financial concept of exit. Right? An exit strategy. The successful silicon business is the one that sold itself to someone else. So most people don't do startups in order to make a life for themselves in that industry. The same way Joe opens a pizzeria because he loves making pizza, and he's happy when he gets to make pizza for the people in his town. The idea is you make the pizzeria to sell it to the mob. Right? To sell it so it becomes something else. And the people who you sell it to aren't interested in making pizza either. They're just running their money through your pizzeria. It's a it's an instrument. So there's that one trend, which is one form of exit, right, of how do you build something in order to escape from it. And the other was the more technological kind of exit, which I traced back mainly to, like, Francis Bacon around the same period as the invention of currency and corporatism. You know, Francis Bacon came up with, or is credited with empirical science. And what he argued empirical science would do is let us take nature by the forelock, hold her down, and submit her to our will. So the idea is there that that science, at least as he understood it, would allow us to deanimate nature and women. I mean, it it it's a rape fantasy, really, to make nature submit to you by holding down her hair and and dominating her. So we end up with a a tradition of of science and technology that are based more in dominating and deanimating, reality, people, nature, women, magic, the occult, everything, by either quantifying it in his era or quantizing it in our era. So I look at those two forces, really, those two streams as dovetailing together in today's tech elite. So on the one hand, they are radically, you know, radically abstract systems thinkers looking at, you know, human systems from the perspective of Uber or Airbnb or God knows what, you know, as as, human systems as capable of being engineered from the top, on the one hand. And on the other, their their idea that they're going to just, you know, make money and and, rise above rise above us. So you you end up with in one extreme, you know, Ray Kurzweil wanting to rise above the chrysalis of matter as pure consciousness by uploading his mind to a a computer. You get, Mark Zuckerberg imagining himself as Augustus Caesar. That's his role model. He cuts his hair in that style because he wants to to dictate above us, and I'm thankful he's modeling himself after Augustus and not Caligula. But still, it's it's still a Roman dictator who's who's living one order of magnitude above everybody else. Or Peter Thiel, who writes his book, Zero to One, where he says to be a successful business, you need to be one order of magnitude or 10 x, above the other. So everybody else competes down there, and you create the website on which they, they aggregate. And that has led to, this idea that most of them seem to understand that the practices that they're involved in can't last forever. They've reached the end of western civilization's ability to provide this this, to foster the escapist fantasy, at least not here. So they really do and this was sort of the the opening of the book. You know, when when five of these billionaires came to me for advice on their bunker strategies because they believe the inevitable event is coming where the world becomes uninhabitable due to climate change, social unrest, a pandemic, nuclear war, electromagnetic pulse, solar radiation, who knows what. So do they get off the planet? Do they build a bunker? Do they do, seasteading? You know, what what can they do to to escape this this thing? And and that's where, you know, I came to this notion of the mindset, which is really just this this idea. And I think they've had it since the beginning on how do you build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust? How do I start a business or build a technology that lets me escape from the externalized damage that that very technology creates?

where do we go if we want to try something new. Right? Yeah. Yeah. I I I agree. It's interesting. I mean, I think the simplest way for for the listeners to identify with what you're saying is the the substackification of journalism. You know, I have friends, and and I'm still able to do it, but I have friends who've worked at magazines, and they want they they get a note from their editor saying, oh, you know, this one paragraph, we really have to cut. It's a bit too speculative, or it's too weird, or it's gonna upset our readers, or it doesn't really belong here. And the writer says, well, no. I insist that paragraph has to stay. And the editor's, no. We really can't publish it like that. Then the writer says, fine then. I'm taking my ball and and I'm gonna play elsewhere. I'm gonna go home. And they open up their own substack because now I can write what I wanna write for my audience in any way I say. And that's what is that? Right? It's it's they have a vision that they feel is not being properly understood by the powers that be, by the filters, by the sensors who are gonna stop them from saying it, so they go off. Rather than doing what I think is more important, the hard work of figuring out how do I convince my editors to let me publish that. Because until I do, then the idea if my editors are good, then the idea I'm not expressing it. I don't have the best arguments yet. I need more research. How do I get it through? You know, it's like the the New York Times writer when the editor says, no. We can't publish your Watergate story yet until you get another source. Look how much better it is when they take the time and find Deep Throat and do the work to get it on the cover of the of the Washington Post. So there's that. It's the same thing that you hear from, Peter Thiel or someone who wants to build a sea steadying, community or whatever or or sea steadying nation out in the ocean where they'll say, well, you know, we won't have to listen to those horrible government laws against cloning or nanotechnology or, you know, bioengineering. And, likewise, Jeffrey Epstein won't have to listen to those stupid laws about not being able to have a harem of 12 year old girls, you know, to to, you know, gestate his his spawn. It's it's it's it's that. So the vision on the one hand, maybe somebody does have a great, you know, James Bond, doctor evil vision for, well, let's just, you know, eliminate half of humanity at the push of a button in order to solve the population problem. But, you know, that's probably not a good one, actually. Maybe there's some good ones, but, there there are reasons why we we have some regulations and laws and why we try to make agreements as a society as to what's permissible and what's not. And and and, yes, and people who see themselves as the super geniuses and see us as just we're just too stupid to understand the brilliance of their vision, want to create some other place, even if it's a Mars colony

Well, the the money definitely helps them live out the fantasy, but I think I mean, this it sounds a little awful, but alright. So the the the I get that their fantasy of the they have the ability to exit without any friction at any time. So they have the experience or they long for the experience of total choice and total freedom. So when you talk to them about, you know, their seasteading communities, the idea is you live on this big kind of hexagonal pontoon with, you know, solar powered propellers. You propel yourself to one of these sea steading nations and attach to it. And then if there's some law or some decision or something you don't like that they do, you just detach and float to a different one that has the laws you like. Right? So this one, oh, no. They're putting limits on my nanotechnology experimental. Fuck you. I'm detaching, and I'm moving, and it's zero cost. Right? There's no there's no there's no friction. There's no cost to leaving. And as far as I'm concerned, if there is no cost to leaving the community that you're in, then it's not a community. That's the whole point is that you're you're knit to it. So I I look at it as a psychological problem that there's this tremendous fear of commitment. And, sorry, but, fear of women, you know, a fear of attachment, a fear of being swallowed up or something. And and when when I first heard this was, it was from Timothy Leary, of all people, you know, the nineteen sixties LSD counterculture hero, when he was reading Stewart Brand's book on Nicholas Negroponte's Media Lab in the late eighties. We're sitting in his in his house in in in Los Angeles, and he's circling, like, every page, he's circling lots of different things in in felt tip. I actually have the the copy of the book. Well, I want you we're not doing video, but but I have the copy of the book right here. And there's all these things. He's like, oh, poor Stuart. You're so confused. Oh, hatred of women and all these comments in there. And I remember when he finished the book, he just threw it across the room and he went. And I went, what? What, Tim? What? And he goes, first, you know, less than 2% of the names in this index are women. You know, that's how you know they have a problem. Then he said, and second, these guys, these technologists, they're just trying to recreate the womb. You know, they're building all these technologies because their mothers were unable to anticipate their every need when they were growing up. They felt abandoned, and now they wanna build a technological womb with algorithms and things that can anticipate what they want before they know they want it and bring it to them so they have this perfect detached, you know, completely safe, you know, digital, you know, dry digital womb. And I think that's the the the core fantasy is that everything's taken care of exactly as they want with zero commitment to anybody or anything else. You know, that's that illusion of freedom. It's it's the Frances Bacon freedom. Right? They've taken nature, taken her by the hair, held her down, submit submitted her to their will to the point where she is deanimated, and everything else is by choice and predictable. Even Kevin Kelly in the his book, what, the the the inevitability, I think he calls it, of the, you know, how technology is gonna grow no matter what. He always says that the point of technology is to give us more choice, more choice, more freedom, more choice. And I I think that choice is a a in certain situations, of course, it's important, but choice, for the most part, is a a false idol. It's a false, I don't want choice. I want love. I want connection. I want people.

I mean, I don't I don't know it so well. And it was funny, when I first saw Network State, I thought of what was it called? I keep forgetting what it's called. Like the NK State. Remember that? This it was this, nineteen eighties European kind of, data esque experiment in it was gonna be a a it was like a mock nonlocal networked state, NK state, they called it. And you get a little passport, and it was a whole thing you belong to. It's like to become a citizen of that rather than wherever you are. But it was a it was an art project. It was a well, political art. It was a a thing. I mean, I don't know that. I mean, I I mainly skimmed it because I get nauseous sometimes when I read stuff that's upsetting to me on a on a philosophical level. But where where network state is is is interesting to me is, on the one hand, it's a little bit like the anarcho syndicalism that I got interested in. I was I was doing a talk when I was kind of just a beginning, economics PhD or whatever it is that I am, digital economics PhD. Before I got that, I was speaking in Germany for a group of, like, these academics that call themselves, like, doctor professor. You know, they had, like, or professor professor. They had, like, multiple titles in front of their names. And I gave this talk, and then someone got up and said, you sound like an anarcho syndicalist. Is that true? And I said, I don't know. Can you a few bars? Because I didn't know what anarcho syndicalism was. But then in the hotel, I looked at it in Wikipedia that night, and I was like, this sounds pretty good. Like, little local, like, kibbutzes sort of, like, local little cooperative owned enterprises that are networked together in order to trade, sort of like a Mondragon sort of society mixed with, like, lefty kibbutzes and free love. And, you know, it just all sounded it sounded good. So the network state on the one hand seems like, oh, we buy land in different places, so we have a a local reality that is then networked together digitally, and then we kind of for power, for mutual power, we declare ourselves a a nation of linked municipalities. So it's like, okay. I get that. As a as a a thought experiment, it's kinda like, that's sort of fun as long as the emphasis is on the local reality where human beings have the home field advantage rather than this bizarre digitally networked reality where we don't. It didn't seem so bad. But what makes it really, appropriate to the moment is it also sounds a lot like, game b. I don't know if you've heard of that one. It's a Jim Rutt and some of the sort of, you know, the the the Daniel Schmachtenberg, you know, Jordan Hall crowd or into this, you know, idea that we're now living in game a, which is a finite game, and they wanna move to game b, which is the infinite game of all of these little, you know, 120 to 150 person groups that are all networked. And then they get this it's just it it just it gets very techno solutionist in its in its, expression, which is what's I my problem with network state too. It's this idea that we can I don't know? It feels like that we're supposed to be able to account for everything up front and and lay it into the blockchain ahead of time, so then it just sort of runs on automatic and we don't have to deal with things. The the the same way that blockchain substitutes for trust, the network state substitutes for the the difficult business of getting along with each other. You know? And and if you read the kind of philosophers that I like, you know, if you read, like, Walter Benjamin through, like, Levinas, you you you come to the conclusion or or even Buber, you come to the conclusion that, you know, no. You you life is hard. It's prickly. It's difficult. It's uneasy. You you you're that frictionless freedom of the perfectly programmed, nation or or network of nations is a red herring. Instead, you wanna get to the more difficult, uncomfortable place of engaging in a living way with other people.

It's something I it's funny. I came up with a metaphor for that idea. I called it the scaled golem. You know, the the the Jews in medieval Europe, they they had this myth that the that the rabbis could get together and create this thing called a golem, which was this kind of Frankenstein, monster person to protect them against the, being killed for blood libel. You know, the Jews were were critic were were suspected of drinking the blood of Christian children. So when whenever there was a a a fear of that happening, they would go and kill a bunch of Jews. So they had this idea that they would create this golem, which was this sort of clay man. And I was thinking that a lot of the the kinds of things that you're describing are we see these giant abstract entities that are a problem, you know, these giant corporations and multinational things and nation states and these these huge abstracted entities. So the the idea then is, oh, well, let us network together and create one of our own, a big monster phantom thing to attack their big monster phantom things. Right? So now we'll build a nation also. We will operate at that scale as well. And and but the the whole point to me is that human beings have the home field advantage on the ground at human scale. Rather, we will always lose on the corporate scale because they have all the money. They have they have that. So, on the one hand, there's that that that scaler fantasy is is so problematic. I understand it, and it's it's very common among tech people who want to do social good rather than just going on the street or helping someone else. They'll say, oh, I want to create the website that aggregates all of the websites that aggregate all of the activists who are work and it's like, no. No. No. There's more websites for activists than there are activists at this point. It's a it's this weird reversal. So there's that. And the other thing is well, two more things. One is this idea that we could just reboot. You know, that's that's sort of this common fantasy that you just move from this to that. So they imagine the that that they want to move to, but they don't really have any theory of change other than pushing the button and getting to the next thing. And for me, the theory of change is the change. That's all we have is the theory of change. I don't even worry about where we are going so much as what is our comportment, how are we engaging with one another, and what sort of society does that lead us to. And then finally, their use of the word sovereign is so funny to me. This the the funniest way is when they call it self sovereign. I'm a self sovereign person. It's like, okay. I am I am one order of magnitude above myself. So I am self sovereign. I am I it's like I'm not only gonna objectify women and animals and nature and all the other people and brown people. I'm now gonna objectify me. So I am going to be the sovereign of that dude, Douglas. You know? So I'm self sovereign. And it's always like the the idea, I'm king of I'm king of me, but I have to also be a subject in order for me to be able to be king of me. So I've gone meta on myself, which is like the the the ultimate sort of the irony here. It's like, okay. You you go do that and and leave the rest of us alone.

No. It is funny. It's it's so fractious. You know, I, my book, Team Human, the sort of The solution to segregation almost. Yes. You know, the motto of Team Human, this book I did before this one, is find the others. And by that, I mean, you know, find the others, the other ones. You know, figure out with people who disagree with you. You know, find the human in the other. And a lot of these groups, you know, not just KB, but a few of them have taken find the others as their, rallying cry that, oh, find the others who are exactly like you and form, you know, your alt Usenet, group. Well, Usenet, that's really dating me. But, you know, find you create your own little online affinity group. Have your own little Facebook page of of with all the other ones who agree with you. But the only thing that's going to do is cause another bifurcation down the line. There's this great joke where they they I keep going to Judaism today, but there's a great joke where they find this this this Jew who's been on a desert island for fifty years after a shipwreck, and he's built two temples on the little island that he's on. And they're like, oh my gosh. You're so religious. You bought two temples? And he goes, no. I built two temples because this is the temple I go to, and that's the temple I won't set my set a foot in. Right? So he's like, he needed the enemy temple in order to have his. I I feel like that's where, you know, that's where this will go.

you cannot just not account for them. Yep. And I think that it comes from I I completely agree that that's that that is where that is where it goes, and that's where why the the it it it logically, it fails on a basic logical level. But then it's like, where does that come from psychologically? And I feel like it psychologically, it might be derivative of the the the libertarian or the neoliberal's fear of debt. You know, they look at debt as a state that you don't desire to be in debt. If you're in debt, that's that's a problem. But anyone who understands community understands that debt is a privilege. When someone moves into your neighborhood, or at least it used to be this way, when someone moved into your neighborhood in The States, the neighbors would come around the first night, and you bring brownies or a meatloaf. You bring them some food or something. And you're not doing it just because they need the food. What you're doing is creating a state of indebtedness in them, which then gives them the opportunity to pay it back to you. So you're knitting them into the fabric of the community by indenting them to you, not because you need something from them, but that's the gift. So, to be indebted, is to be, like you would say, is to be interrelated. It's to be interdependent. And that is a once you experience interdependency with someone else, that's beautiful. But, again, that goes against the kind of Francis Bacon Media Lab mindset of I am a completely self sufficient, self sovereign, totally independent, completely free to choose individual who owes nothing to anybody and needs to follow no other, no other system's laws. And that's not as we understand, that's not a desirable state, but it is desirable to someone who is that afraid of nature, that afraid of in being trapped or attached or, somehow within a system rather than always somehow, capable of pushing a button and and rising above it. Yeah.

It is, though. The Bubble Boy. No germs. No nukes. No. It's it's well, there was a show in the in The US back when when I was a little kid called The Little Rascals. It was this old black and white, you know, funny thing with these kids. And the little boys would make a little clubhouse or a treehouse, and they'd put a sign, you know, our club, no girls allowed. And they, you know, the r would always be backwards because they could barely write. And I feel like that's where these boys, mostly boys, that's where these people are at. I wanna make my club with my people, and we're in charge, and we make the rules, and I'm the king, and no girls, and you break my rules, and I can kick you out. And if I don't like it, I could go to that tree over there. You know? And and it's like it's a such a a disposable, disposable approach to life.

question that, say, you know, Walter Lippmann was asking in the early nineteen hundreds about people and the masses. You know, he was a progressive, originally, Walter Littmann. He he invented the field of public relations, but he did it because he genuinely came to believe that people, human beings for the most part, most of us, are just responding to the pictures in our heads, that we are in Plato's cave. We're not seeing reality for what it is. And whoever puts the pictures in our heads is responsible for what we think and and how we vote and how we act. And he decided that people are really just too stupid to make these choices for themselves, that what we need is a council of experts who have a special building in in Washington, DC, you know, near the White House. The council of experts and scientists and, you know, economics experts, they figure out what the policy should be, and they they tell the our our leaders what to do. And the leaders do those policies, and then they hire public relations people to convince the masses that those are the right policies. You know, and he came up with this after he was working for Woodrow Wilson. Woodrow Wilson ran for president on a peace platform and then decided to intervene in World War one to send everybody over there. So how do you convince America to go to war after they've just elected a president who said he's he's supporting peace? And that was when, you know, in America anyway, that's when public relations was born or or reborn. So the the possibility, and this is Lippmann's side, and I try not to agree with it, but sometimes I'm afraid it might be right, is that people are just too stupid. We we just are too stupid, too emotional. There's a lot of different levels. Maybe people are too poor to get properly educated, or people are are too angry to consider, progressive policies. They believe superstition. There's still millions of Americans who think I mean, almost half of America thinks that there's a ring of peterists who run the world government and, you know, and and pull special fluids from children's blood. I mean, sort of a a version of the of the myth we were talking about before about blood libel. If if a significant portion of Americans believe that, enough to sway elections, then what is our choice? So I understand the tech elitist's idea that people are kind of dumb, and, those of us who are capable can be part of an elite who makes choices for them, but, we we can't leave them to their own devices. You know, there's there's there's that fear. And you talk to a lot of world leaders, and they will say, of course, this is true. People don't wanna worry about it. People just wanna do their work and tell them what to think, and they'll be happier rather than, you know, you just need someone more benevolently doing it than than Donald Trump or Bolsonaro or somebody.

There's a few. Yeah. For me, what comes to mind is, you know, Marshall McLuhan said that the digital would retrieve the medieval. And I've taken that very seriously because even since before I read McLuhan, I always felt that digital was wasn't fostering a a revolution so much as a renaissance, a rebirth of old forms in a new context. And what happens in a renaissance is the things that were repressed in the last renaissance end up reborn, and the things that were reborn in the last renaissance end up diminishing. So if in the last renaissance we got you know, the in the last renaissance, we got a lot of things, you know, printing press and perspective and all these things and the individual, But we also got the nation state. You know, the in the last renaissance is when we moved from the city state to the nation state, from what I would argue the city state is a more, organic, natural amalgamation of people around a location, and the nation state was this abstracted boundary line around a a set of of of city states. And and that the nation state required these myths of origin, whether it was the, you know, Israel, the the myth of origin in in Torah of these different tribes, or the myth of origin of, you know, you are not Venetians. You are Italians. You are not, you know, you are this. So that if we were retrieving the medieval in this in this new digital age, then would we see the the collapse of the nation state and the retrieval of something like the city state? You know, something more local and peer to peer and based on actual people, exchanging value again rather than delivering value up to these, you know, giant centralized corporations. So there was in that original cypherpunk drive the idea that, well, if we can even the cypherpunk, which led to even Bitcoin, if we can authenticate transactions in a peer to peer fashion, then we don't need this extractive nation state currency anymore. You know, if and and there was that that was part of a healthy drive, you know, and while, you know, while these these, you know, network state people might want to to reify the state in a new abstracted digital thing, or while, token people might want to use the blockchain to, you know, reify capitalism or reify speculative investment, the underlying technology's drive, I would argue, and the original impulse was toward the opposite, was towards something much you know, it's just what we imagined in on the dance floor of the rave, right, was a new, a new form of of connection and interdependency. And then how do we, you know, how do we account for that? What do we use as a ledger for that? How do we, you know, take that that privilege away from, you know, the wealthy authorities and, and claim it for ourselves. You know, I see all that as a kind of retrieval of a of an artisan, local, peer to peer, hands on, locally, arbitrated, politic that that's, you know, certainly implied by the kinds of digital technology that we were thinking of in the nineties.

Yes. And the commons is another, again, medieval. You know? Another medieval institution that, you know, it was forgotten and then and despised. You know? It it it this whole I mean, you talked to to the com about the commons with any economist today, and they say, oh, well, the tragedy of the commons. And it's like, that's that's not even real. Didn't happen. It was a lie. Yeah. The commons work. So tragedy of the commons they're talking about is more like the the public restroom at a at a gas station that no one cleans it. Right? Because it's disgusting, and no one's taking responsibility. That's not a governed commons. That's a a a bathroom Right. For god's sake. Yet and the other thing I I was thinking about when you were speaking was was John Barlow and the declaration of independence of cyberspace and how we fell for that at the time. I mean, I was a little suspicious of it because it was written at Davos and appeared first in Wired magazine. So it was like, I my hackles were up. But John Barlow was a the liver cyst of the grateful dead. He had the best psychedelic counterculture, you know, credentials you could have, and he writes this thing that begins saying, like, governments of the world, nation states, beware. We don't need you anymore. And for those of us at the time who had been subjected to the FBI's Operation Sun Devil where the national government came and arrested hackers and one guy's sister was on the ground at gunpoint, you know, and they they were doing terrible things. They were so afraid of the Internet and what it meant. They didn't understand it that we really did cast government as the enemy. And what we didn't realize was that by getting rid of government, we created free rein for business. That government and business, everyone knows now, you know, they balance each other a bit like bacteria and fungus in the body. So you get rid of all the bacteria, then the fungus just grows. And we got rid of government on the net, we repressed it, and then business took over. So, of course, even our, this model of government that they're talking about involves competition. It's like a free market competition of government styles, you know, competing at different levels of this sort of, network fractal in which, you know, governance takes place. It's I I admire the the idealism of it. Right? But but it's it's trapped in assumption underlying assumptions that are not being recognized, you know, which is this this false understanding of nature as an entirely competitive process and, you know, just not understanding, again. And it's because they're children. You know, they're they're children living out this I understand this Little Rascals Boy fantasy of it really all just working, and I get a robot girl, and I don't have to worry about real things anymore. And it's like, no. It just doesn't doesn't work like that. It's messy, and you've gotta learn to to embrace the mess,

I mean, yes and no. I mean, the the third way that I guess I've been advocating is that many, many fewer of us need to be involved in the global coordination question than want to be involved. In other words, we don't need to do this on on Twitter. The the I mean, the moment I realized this was when I I someone called me for an interview, and they wanted to know my opinion of Joe Biden's withdrawal strategy from Afghanistan. And I'm like, why are you asking me, you know, about I know nothing about Afghanistan or war or withdrawal. It's like, the I'm sure just there's a 100,000 people on Twitter who can argue about just that, you know, rather than the 10,000,000 who are trying to argue about it now, and and we'll be just fine. So what I've been trying to do is to help people realize behave more locally, is to say, alright. Stop making the website about the thing and just do the thing. Just borrow something, lend something to your neighbor, teach other kids how to read, look at where where's the water coming from, where's the food coming from, that that 99% of us can function on an entirely local level and let another 1% work out these larger coordinated, issues. You know? And I'm more than happy to abdicate my responsibility to, for for those big things to people who understand, larger systems. But the, you know, how that, how that happens, I I honestly don't know. All I know that I can do is relieve some of the stress on these larger systems by making people more locally, you know, more local and more dependent on each other. You know, every fewer things that we buy from Amazon and Walmart and those places, the the the less power they have, you know, the less dependent we are on large global systems for our food, for our our our stuff, you know, the the less brittle and and dominating, they will they will be. So I almost feel like the the best I can do is help lighten the load on those systems so that the people who are smart enough to sort of coordinate them are just dealing with a few things, you know, rather than everything. You know? Right now, if you if you eat shrimp in New York City, those shrimp were harvested in The Gulf Of Mexico. They were shipped to Thailand and China to be deshelled and then shipped back to the South and then shipped up to New York. You know, that can't be the way to do food. You know? And and just that you know, if if all of those systems were were, I mean, for my money, eliminated and and replaced with more with more local ones, it would take so much of the, responsibility off these tremendous international networks. And, of course, it would be better for climate. And then we could we could give our our whatever this internationally coordinated, government thing is, more, more more time and slack to, work out these problems.

Oh. Nice, man. I like that. The cordi. The cordi Co ordi? Co ordi. Co ordi. Co ordi. Co ordi nation. I know. It's just it's not it's the funny thing is that it's not rocket science. You know, it's only become so difficult because so much, activity happens at scale, which again is the .com startup guy's dream. Everything has to happen at scale. And as far as I'm concerned, almost nothing needs to happen at scale. But for me, scale scale is the problem. Goes back to the scaled golem, you know, that we're gonna build this giant nation state thing to fight our battles for us. And it's like, no. Building the thing is the problem. You know? Operating at that level is is, for me, is the problem. And and it's and it's okay. It's just hard. It's gonna be hard. You we might have to give up the idea of I'm gonna be able to behold all of civilization at once in my own little brain. I'm just gonna live where I live and have my friends and make love and do stuff. But, you know, it's like when you start operating at human scale, life is so much more fun. It's so much more rewarding. And, I just feel like the more of us can do that, you know, and stop looking for the, you know, the blockchain that will solve the universal problem, the the NEOM. I mean, NEOM is a great metaphor to end on. NEOM, this fake city they wanna build in Saudi Arabia. Yeah. It's, like, whatever, a 100 miles long and a mile wide, whatever it is. Beautiful. Yeah. The line. This great city, solar powered, perfect thing, billions of dollars, the smartest arts people, currency people, religion people, social people, irrigation people. They've all fought it up. There's gonna be a beautiful stack, like, you know, a software stack that's gonna run this whole thing. The only problem is it turns out there's, like, 20,000 Bedouins who've been living there sustainably for the last seven thousand years. So in order to build our sustainable next nation, NEOM, we've gotta clear out the people who've actually been doing the thing for the last six thousand years rather than rather than just joining them. So that's where, you know, that's where these these most of these giant systemic hand wavy, global solutions are really run into their problems.

You know, it's a wonderful, takedown of a bunch of people that deserve to be taken down, with their, you know, bizarre fantasies of escape. You know? And, you can come. I've got a podcast of my own called Team Human. You can see at teamhuman.fm or, just come find me. I'm in New York, and we'll hang out.