Greetings Future Fossils and welcome back for episode 187 of the podcast that explores our place and time. I'm your host Michael Garfield and today I'm excited to welcome back Kevin Welch, Chair of the Board for EFF Austin as well as Board member David Hensley to very interesting and savvy people working to preserve our civil liberties in the ever morphing electronic frontier. This was a special rare live podcast recording at the West China Tea House in Austin where I just got back from my first vacation in over three years if you can even call a long distance traveling with two small children of vacation. But it was nonetheless very good for my soul and the soul of my wife to see so many of our old friends and visit so many of our old favorite haunts from before we became parents and moved to Santa Fe.
One of those places again is the West China Tea House where I did this recording and also played a short concert, some of which I will share here shortly on the Patreon. Speaking of which, I wanted to take a moment to celebrate and thank new patrons Emerson Sparts, Paul Jigman, Brandon Norgaard, and Luke for helping me keep this show afloat folks. Future Fossils is and always has been listener supported and extremely weird. It is not the kind of show that easily finds sponsors even if they were the way that I wanted to sustain this program and so your modest contributions really make the difference for me as I navigate the insanity of early parenthood and balancing the responsibilities of this show and all of the other things I do for it including the moderation of the Future Fossils Facebook and Discord groups.
Plus rather than pissing into the wind of major social media channels every time I want to share something new, it is an honor and a delight to have a small focused group of fans with whom I can share all of my new music and art and other fun things, unpublished writing, etc. And we just reformed the Future Fossils book club so no longer am I trying to host these synchronous video calls and instead I'm just using the Discord server's Patreon only channels as a place where I can drop excerpts, clippings and notes on my favorite current reads that's going really well. Otherwise imagine that we will also soon have some watch parties because we are in fact in the Golden Age of cinematic narrative as far as I'm concerned and there's been a lot of cool stuff worth viewing and discussing and I hope to do that with you soon. Anyway this episode is a really broad general conversation about the challenges posed by Technologies Accelerating Evolution and the inability of people to understand its consequences or for regulation to properly keep pace with it.
Dubtails very nicely with the last EFF Austin event that I did together with Kevin and a number of other excellent people which I will link to in the show notes as well as copious links and resources if you don't feel like listening to this episode with a pen and paper at hand. As always the complete show notes are available on Patreon because podcasts, syndicators, truncate my show notes and it's important to me that I make the effort to give you something far more replete and in depth than is characteristic for this format. Last note before we begin I have an extensive list of planned upcoming guests but I don't find that list to be terribly well representative of the full spectrum of human diversity and I welcome additional suggestions if you want to offer guest suggestions then you can DM me on Twitter or you can add them to the upcoming guests channel in the Discord server. Thank you so much for listening.
I hope that you remain free and easy with plenty of grace under pressure during this mind bogglingly complicated until she was time. Thanks again for your support whether it comes in the form of rating and reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts immensely helpful. I don't think I have to remind you more buying artwork or music and again thanks and appreciation to everyone who has been doing that recently. Much more good stuff to come and until then enjoy this very far reaching and beautifully ornate conversation with Kevin Welch and David Hensley.
Alright so again thank you everyone for being here and thanks for putting up with my music for the last half an hour and we'll do more later if you can survive it but for now a completely different ordeal and I mean that in the sweetest way because I wanted to set the frame here as I was telling the guys before we got started Future Fossils is a podcast about us living in what I believe to be a very unusual time and like every generation feels that way or so we would like to think but the truth of it is I work at the Santa Fe Institute it's an international hub for complex systems research and one of our faculty members is Stuart Firestein who just gave a talk that I was responsible for covering on Twitter and you can find on the at SFI Science Twitter account about ignorance failure uncertainty and optimism and he's a former chair of or the director of the Columbia University biology department and spent 15 years in New York theater before he went into biology so he's somebody who's authority I assume and he's a brilliant interesting well-rounded guy and he loves talking about the role of uncertainty in what he calls being optimistical like a philosophical optimism in which you accept that things can change and therefore things could be better and therefore maybe things will be better and that he reminds us that was not always the case that for hundreds or thousands of years depending on the culture in which you were born people didn't really expect that things were ever going to be different and we've had we've lived in this weird circumstance over the last few centuries where progress was assumed if not you know at least sort of hoped for and that people expected that you know their children were going to inherit a different world than they inherited so you know I do think that we're in a kind of a special time because you know every generation has its own challenges but ours are especially large pernicious systemic interlate complex unpredictable highly contingent on the ways that we interact with them and the more that we try to understand something the sort of the more our ability to predict that things slips out from our fingers and vice versa you can predict very well but you can't understand how the predictive algorithms came to that that accurate assessment so at we live in time that we do expect things to be different we can't say how and it's very uncomfortable and so this show exists as a way of creating a record of what it was like to be alive at this very unusual time when so very much was uncertain and and with that I want to give Kevin and David's opportunity to introduce themselves here as individuals we already know that they're representing a very fine organization that I highly encourage you to support EFF Austin which I'm sure they'll talk more about here in a minute but anyway thank you for coming back Kevin and thank you David for being here and talk about yourselves a little bit sure I guess I'll go first and then I'll let him things over to David is that level how you want it okay there we go all right there's all welcome everybody thank you coming out to community we're very grateful to have all of you here and as always I want to thank Michael for the opportunity to speak on his amazing podcast if you've never listened to future fossils you absolutely should give it a listen he's if other podcasts leave you going I wish they went ten layers deeper his is the podcast for you but he has lots of really interesting people really asking really media interesting questions about this weird time in history but yeah as Michael said I was on a panel for a live podcast teaming of his about four years ago back when Michael still lived in Austin was also on that with two other EFF Austin board members Heather Varfield who's here tonight as well as Maggie Duvall who also now lives out in New Mexico where Michael now lives so yeah we had a lot of fun with that conversation yeah and I guess just to give a little schviel yeah I'm Kevin Welch I'm the current president of the board at EFF Austin it is a 30 years old Austin based issue might gather from the name Digital Civil Liberties Organization I was not there when it was founded because I was in this city but I was like three so I came along much later and so to be clear we are closely affiliated with Electronic Frontier Foundation which was founded about the same time in San Francisco in fact a former president of EFF Austin Richard McKinnon was literally in the room in Silicon Valley where electronic frontier foundation was founded our organizations are highly intertwined there was a lot across pollination of the people who founded both but if you've never heard about Electronic Frontier Foundation it is the nation's oldest and largest digital civil liberties advocacy organization they fight for things like net neutrality in the end encryption protecting section 230 of the CDA which we'll probably talk about at some point tonight and just you know basically you can kind of think of them as the ACLU for the internet and emerging digital technologies they especially fight for your first and fourth amendment rights in emerging digital spaces so yeah I try to do education and rabble rousing here in Austin with the organization I'm a full-stack software developer by my day job so I hopefully know some stuff about this that is relevant though I'm always learning more every that's not about me let's let David talk a little bit and introduce himself who David is also on our board hello everyone I'm David I'm actually really excited to be on the show because I have a actually a few friends who actually like future fossils and they're like oh my god this short minds we have you I hate this like say that because that sounds kind of you go physical but it's like oh yeah I can see a lot of overlap in the way that I think of the subjects that are being discussed in this content and so to actually like be discussing a content on the show it's like super meta so thank you I like heaven said I'm on the FFF awesome board I'm more of a researcher writer type of person so I do a lot of research and writing I also like to imagine that I'm one of the conical characters I love so much and that's how I continue to read dense boring literature so I can make it more digestible for everyone in such a way since these and that's pretty much who I am so there's a little intro for you Michael great so one of the things that I want to raise with you and we're going to take a kind of less structured approach to this than I were nearly wood because I'm not in a planning mood this week I'm technically on vacation if you can believe this but I love just jazzing with smart people and likewise and what I want to like where I want to start this is that all of us are I think I can say very concerned about the relationship between technology and culture but there's like this thing that Cory Doctorow who is a big famous science fiction author and a big member of the parent organization the FF organization when he was out in Sanofi a few years ago I saw him speak and he said about science fiction that science fiction usually looks at things kind of atomistically it's a thought experiment in which people kind of treat it like a controlled experiment where you're changing one variable and anybody who's followed the drama of biosphere 2 which was this big facility they built in in Arizona in the 90s and then was eventually stolen by a hostile takeover crew sponsored by the Bass oil fortune which helps you know fun the thing in the first place but then decided that this thing was kind of a bad PR opportunity for them because it was getting a lot of attention around the world for attempting to reproduce the entire earth biosphere inside a building like a seminal historic event but it was it was understood as like a game show like an effort to lock eight brave people inside a building for two years and see if they could pull it off like farm all of their own food and maintain the atmosphere and of course that was a goal but it wasn't the goal this was an experiment that was intended to run 50 times in a row over the course of a century just to see what kind of weird nonlinear events would occur like what unpredictable things would happen and so unpredictable things did happen and they generated too much co2 and they almost choked themselves out and they eventually had to open the building all of this stuff is gathered in a movie called spaceship earth a documentary I highly respect and recommend but the point was that in the 90s people didn't understand that science could succeed through failing the point is that you learn something through finding out something that you didn't know about the conditions that you set for the experiment and ecological experiments are full of these opportunities and so they were like oh they lost the game show we better call and see if they hadn't shut this down and force all of these people out of the building with an armed federal team and I feel like there's something in that story that's kind of lessened about but the way that we think about speculative futures and the like somebody over here is an expert in climate change and somebody over here is an expert in computer science and these people tend to project their own sort of narrow domain of expertise into a future and not understand all of the sort of second order stuff going on around the future that they see so clearly and so all of us are sort of presuming our own knowledge into futures that are going to get sidelined by all of this other stuff that we don't understand and I'm just curious I mean at that point that's like a long weird kind of but like I'm curious to know kind of what you see what you're confident about about the future and then kind of like what you in the Donald Rumsfeld sense like what are the known unknowns for you that the places where you feel like what you think is going to happen might be challenged how all the pieces sort of loosely fit together for you and what do you see coming and what might interrupt that like what might stop the future you see from coming from coming I guess and then we can kind of explore the unknown unknowns or try to well that's a very easy question to answer so it shouldn't be hard I have some thoughts on that an alternative to David and his thoughts in a second but I think I just wanted to start with I think it's it's interesting you go back to the 90s and this sort of utopian vision of biosphere two that then ended in colossal failures both of just not anticipating some of the scientific consequences but also the societal capitalistic interplay that undermined the utopian vision and I think feelings and like that are very resonant with the fight and struggle for digital celebrities and the idea of you know the internet in the 90s there was a common countercultural thread of thinking of the internet is what you might call a cyberdelect sort of created by Timothy Wery of all people who was friends with the people who founded EFF actually because one of the founders of EFF was the Grateful Dead where he says John Perry Barlow so he was good friends with Timothy Wery but there was sort of this sense that just like in the 60s that psychedelic drugs are going to be mind-expanding a lot of these early cyberpunks felt very much the same way about the internet that almost as the phenomenologists would say the internet was a mental technology that was going to expand people's minds and so there was a lot of techno utopianism kind of exemplified by John Perry Barlow famously in 1996 at the World Abbose Conference in Switzerland which as you all know that's basically the Illuminati clubhouse but basically Barlow goes in there this kind of countercultural dude who's been invited there because he's from a rich Wyoming ranching family and also as an expert on the emerging internet that all these Davos people want to know about but he famously wrote The Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace at 1996 in Davos and it's an incredible document because it's most so utopian but it also appears with 25 years hindsight remarkably optimistically naive about what the internet would do and what it was capable of and I still believe in the idealism in that document but what has actually happened with the internet over the last 25 years I'm forced to conclude that maybe building a technology to unite all of us in peace 11 understanding is not as easy as maybe we all thought 25 years ago that's where my mind initially goes with that Michael and I think I could say about more but I want to hear David's initial thoughts before I continue or we go somewhere else so before I go on my incohesive tangent so the question the current question is kind of exploring our known unknowns correct is that what you wanted us to kind of catalog Michael okay so the known unknowns I think or that come to my mind is we know that not everyone is going to have access to the same resources if we continue on our current path and that being the case that will create various aesthetics that will kind of form and evolve around what people are doing with what they have and then in so far as we continue to allow markets to dominate our social organizational structures certain trends and languages and all kinds of aspects will find their way into more industrial powerhouses and that'll kind of like determine okay exactly what aesthetics are going to be the most popular or least popular and that'll just keep fluctuating and I think that it's going to be kind of like we're living in a everyone's living in a different timeline almost but at the same time kind of like how we deal with ideology now people live in dramatically different realities but we can all be sitting in the same room at the same time and I think that like what I don't know is what technology is going to do what because I mean we're like what how many steps away from quantum computing just changing everything that we know about like like computers right and so I don't know I think we know that different times oh sorry I'm not too close to the we know the different technologies are going to happen and change people's lives but we don't know who's going to have access to what and we don't know how that's going to affect our organizational structures all right so the sort of follow up to that would be then I think a lot about well you know I grew up with Jurassic Park and so like I've spent now 31 years meditating on the inability of technocratic systems to contain the unintended consequences that they create and Creighton was very prescient writing that novel in the 80s about biotechnology that is still barely in the works but the last two years whether the coronavirus was a zoan not a given this or whether it was an escaped gain a function experiment the fact is that it's something that only happened because the processes of globalism have done everything in their self organizing agency to knock down barriers between systems that have natural barriers between them that's actually incidentally that's why this has been a golden age for dinosaur science I talked about that with paleontologist Steve Prusati in episode 70 about how it's actually the Chinese building condos their rise into modern pseudo capitalism or whatever you call that is why we've had this explosion of new dinosaur discoveries coming out of China for the last 30 years and that's true all over the global south that's why we've discovered the biggest dinosaurs that have ever lived down in Argentina you know because they're developing all of this land and and so you think about biotechnology in particular as something that like CRISPR I don't know how many of you know this gene editing technology that they've now decided some group of people acting without proper oversight have decided that they're going to use this technology to edit mosquitoes so that mosquitoes are not carrying malaria and of course like this sounds great for about 30 seconds if you've never thought about it before but then of course you're like wait a minute the whole food chain on land depends on mosquitoes what we have the non-zero chance that we fuck this up you know that suddenly the whole ecosystem collapses around us because we were trying to silver bullet this disease and so I'm here I love what you said David about this pluralism involved here in the splintering and that's certainly true but at the same time like I think about people that are like well my experience of Twitter is great because I just mute everybody I don't like and I'm like you're living in a gated neighborhood crime still happens and eventually the tide of crime will come seeping in through the gates of your cozy little paradise of willful ignorance and so I do think that the world will continue to splinter culturally socially even biologically that you know humans are going to speciate with garage gene editing experiments you know but at the same time we're also going to be catching each other's engineered mind-altering plagues that have been just sneezed into the atmosphere and so I'm curious where the two of you see that sort of squiggly boundary between what it is that we can effectively wall off in Sourcell what can we keep separate and what what are the things that regardless of the direction that we want our own local and regional lives and sort of cultural sub-cultural lives to take there are going to be things that everyone has to contend with and I'm curious what those things are and what you see basically as the parts of our lives as individuals whatever that means anymore that are sort of sacrosanct and invulnerable to the constant reshuffling of boundaries are there any of those things I guess it's a good way to start it and if they are what are they and if not then what are we all stuck with like what are the things that you see this the waves you see washing over all of us no matter what little island we choose to live on so if I understand her question correctly a Marxist would say the material conditions are what is the kind of common denominator that literally everyone shares and so food water shelter safety from wild animals and developing diseases I think those are the things that will that are that will forever bind people but let me think some more because I want to believe that there's something that I'm missing but it's an unknown unknown so thermodynamics well what are we going to have to deal with even if we try to live in blissful ignorance well I mean you know it ties into you know I find myself at this weird place often in my activism where I tend to be pretty anarchistic in my leanings I tend to be suspicious of power imbalances wherever you find them whether that be the government or corporations I don't like people taking advantage of other people but you know a lot yet despite that I'm always very politically involved I always encourage people to vote vote vote vote in every single election fight every way you can to make a better world even if these systems are flawed I even present it almost like you know as I said I'm a programmer by trade and I'm like just because I can't write bug-free code doesn't mean I stop writing programs just because any government system by necessity is flawed doesn't mean you stop engaging with it you get the world you build and so I think you know when I see people get cynical you know and they're they to your point where they're just like I'm going to make my list a little bubble or anytime I see these memes of like oh well I'm going to turn my phone off and I'm going to go into the woods and I'm going to ignore all this hate from all sides and just you know the problem is the phone and the technology and that I'm learning all these horrible things and I'm like well you know if there's a flood coming your way the flood doesn't stop coming your way just because you turn the radio warning you about it off you're still going to drown so I guess in a way I do have a similar answer to David's but maybe almost like a non-materialist maybe almost a you know a phenomenological or you know like I'm forgetting the term like George Berkeley the philosopher famously said there is no matter there is only mind and so I'm like maybe viewing it like even in these digital worlds there are psychic waves that are going to come for you even if you try to ignore them so I think that the things that the different perspectives disagree with are what's actually going to be the most binding things because if one person's in one reality and one person's in another reality and they come across a current and they can't agree on the nature or the actuality of that occurrence that in and of itself is a binding psychic is unresonance a word is in nature dissonance dissonance there we go that's a psychic dissonance between ontologies and then it becomes up to the various parties that are disagreeing to figure out who's actually wrong that process in and of itself is a lot of obstacles a lot of ego to work through a lot of fear and I think that those invoke somatic experiences that we also all share and once we all actually start respecting each other's somatic experiences and dependents of our own context to the stimulation of those experiences I think that's what we're all truly united because that is what our brains and bodies do maybe I can sort of like refine this question based on the feedback that both of you just offered I want champion the work that you're doing and the EFF is doing because in a much more mundane way than we've been talking up to this point I think there are when we talk about like the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns there are these every technology creates these foot holds for something in which something can grow it's an evolutionary biology kind of thing every new thing in an ecosystem creates new niches new opportunities into which other organisms can adapt and which they can and this is true and with legal technologies this is true with law that you know I think it's very obvious not to linger on this but it's very obvious given the horrors that we've experienced as a nation over the last few years with these mass shootings I'm not saying anything you haven't heard that the legal framework that we inherited that's 300 years old didn't account for AR-15s it didn't count for a lot of shit yeah it's like you know and the same is true for free speech like free speech wasn't like that we weren't prepared for twitter we weren't prepared for donald trump we weren't prepared for people we weren't prepared for an un-Christian society right we weren't prepared for a society of many reasons yeah but like we weren't prepared for a society in which one person's voice can reach 300 million people at the same time and the effects of the asymmetries of influence that arise out of that space and what it means for somebody to say things in public at such a scale and so you know and I think the same can be said this is my point this is what I want to do the two of you to speak to I think the same can be said for pretty much any law about digital communications technologies because ultimately we're living in an age in which silicon valley and the values that it exports and the values that it promotes through its innovation are values it's a world in which the human being is a digital creature it is it is an algorithmic creature we're not talking about the self of rational enlightenment france that's sort of this discrete atomistic agent we're talking about somebody whose brain in the words of neuroscientist David Eagleman made me do it this is the defense of someone who is like the Twinkie defense right like I'm a biochemical creature and you can stimulate my brain with electrodes and force me to do something you know Michael Creighton another shout out to his novel terminal man you know so like we live in the world of terminal man as much as we live in the world Jurassic Park or in drama strain that's sorry not so much Congo yet but that's probably coming anyway so you know it seems to me like the entire conversation that eff is advancing is not simply about computers and the importance of encrypting one's cell phone it's about what happens when technology reaches the core of the individual modern person that's no longer an individual but as it is as Delus said like divvidual or you know in other ways things like porous like they're you know we're connected with each other messily and we're all right so yeah we're subdivisible into all of these different modular units now and so like the implications of the law around digital technology extend into the most intimate places of each of us it's not just about whether somebody can hack your bank account it's about whether ultimately somebody can hack your pacemaker and then a few years later it's about whether somebody can hack your neural link and then a few years later it's about whether somebody can hack your genome and these are questions that most people don't seem to be thinking about and prepared for so i'd love to hear you speak to that well i have a lot i can speak to that first of all i i totally resonate with the thought about like yeah i mean there's immense similarities between laws of profession and programming as a profession they both involve in a way writing magic spells as it were actually like one i mean first of all anybody who tells you that uh speech can hurt people's speeches and dangerous they are wrong if speech wasn't dangerous no one would ever try to ban it is incredibly powerful i really think of an interview i saw with a famed graphic novelist Alan Moore one time where he points out it is not a coincidence that when we write and say that we spell words and it's the same breed as magic spell that is not a coincidence they linguistically come from the same place because many ancient cultures understood the act of speaking is magical it is actually a mind control technology by speaking you can change somebody's mind and make them do what you think they should do so not only is it a constant process of literally shaping our shared reality with each other at creating the law but i mean to to do this point of like that you know it's a work in progress i got a lot wrong why even think to anybody interested in this conversation i highly recommend go watching the new george carvin documentary american dream on hbo like that man has some smart things to say about free speech and what he said that i thought was a resident of this is he basically was like you don't have rights it's made up we made them all up basically so this document we're all arguing over what it meant we made it up it is nothing real that we cannot change if we want to change it and so yeah i mean what we're discovering is we're being hamstrung by concepts that were created in a totally different historical framework that are breaking down to your point michael it's like you know okay so freedom of speech i have the right to say what i want but does that equal that i have the right to have every other human on the planet has to hear every utterance i make and if they don't hear it for any reason that censorship and my first amendment rights are being violated i i mean i don't think the law even ever considered a scenario when it was written in the late 1700s that i would be able to speak to all seven billion people on the planet with my speech it's it just didn't even consider the possibility i just i find our notion of the freedom of speech so humorous it's so archaic and i'll keep this short because i actually want to answer your question it's just that someone got mad at parliament because they wanted to write about divorce and their claim was that because truth will always reign supreme freedom of speech that they used to be allowed i like being able to say what i like to say i think everyone should be able to say what they want to say but i'm not i'm not going to sit here and say that after the neurological research has been done and this show that consistent exposure to disinformation changes your ability to believe things that what we've learned now is is exceeded that archaic idea of how what truth can do and when you live in a world where you're bombarded by advertisements and propaganda and all kinds of subliminal messaging and movies and tv and books and music it's just hard for me to like actually believe that truth will reign supreme in a profit-driven society but that wasn't the answer to your question i just wanted to go off about the freedom of speech for a minute no i'm good i'm good for card without growing money it's but now to your point on technology reaching our inner core now while there are a lot of like biological hazards regarding like pacenakers and things like that i also think that the way that the algorithms to the various tools that we use bring us content based on what we seek is kind of a form of shadow work and if you're seeing bullshit on your social media feed maybe you should consider why you're interested in bullshit not to say that it's going to bring you bullshit you know regardless of what you do or do not choose because you're going to see some stupid shit on social media because it's social media but also a lot of what you see is going to be driven by your decision making and that's invasive yes i'm not going to say that's not invasive but it's also an opportunity for us i think so really think about our actual immaterial course and how technology is going to affect us i think that it's an opportunity for reflection honestly and actually to answer your question more directly one thing i was reading recently that i think really gets to the core of the way that neurobiologically neurochemically these systems are really changing who we are and how we relate to each other is that you know everybody is ringing their hands rightfully in some cases ridiculously and others about censorship by the big platforms like facebook like twitter like youtube but there's actually a far more insidious form of censorship in digital spaces that doesn't really get discussed very often which is what is the main neurochemical reward of modern social networks and feeds it is the ubiquitous like we want to get likes we want to get hearts we want to get hahaz we want to get numbers saying what i said was appreciated by the other people and what starts happening when you can quantify approval is and no matter how much you mean not to do this and speak your real opinion you will start altering your thoughts to be what the algorithm rewards what gets you likes what gets you thoughts you will start self-sensuring to get approval from your community and you won't even realize this is happening you're talking about that the internet is made of demons article yes yes yes yes yes yes yes so yeah i worry about self-sensorship you don't even know you're doing more than platform censorship not that that can't be a huge problem sometimes so that's a really good i want to linger there on that because you know there was between that piece which i will link to in the show notes and if you get on my infrequent emails i'll make sure that i remind myself to send you this that article and in this other article that at the new york review of books that tim sneider wrote about what turing did not understand about the digital threat to human even future, which is largely about the agency of these non-human, discarnate things that now inhabit this digital wilderness we've created. We're like, Eric Davis talks about it. We talked about reanimism, that there's something about the affordances of tangled electronic surround in which we find ourselves now that are more like the world of Amazonian shamanism than they are like the world of Oscar Wilde and like cucumber sandwiches and writing each other letters flirtatiously, you know, all this like 18th, 19th centuries stuff. But that it's like, no, we live in a world in which we have not beaten away the tigers and the dragons and so on.
We are surrounded by things we don't understand. We're made out of things we don't understand. We know that like, you know, like this whole thing about, now I'm getting gut health stuff on Facebook. You want to talk about shadow work?
It's like I must have bought one too many bottles of pepto-bismol or something. And now it's making me reflect on my habits and how my habits are not only influencing these invisible microbial system inside of me, but also this sort of digital microbial system in which I'm embedded. We're living in a very highly populated and mysterious ecosystem in which humans are no longer capable of ballooning ourselves that we exist on the top of a food chain. We've somehow vanquished and conquered everything else in the world.
And so, you know, I'd love to hear in the context of everything else that we have been said in this conversation, I'd love to know kind of how your reflections on that influences you see all of this other stuff unfolding because for me, and I talked about this with Chris Ryan, the author of a book called Civilized to Death and the Host of the Fantastic Tangentially Speaking Podcast on Future Fossils 178. Because he and I were talking about how human institutions like EFF Austin, like the United States, like the Federal Reserve, like Disney, these things are in a way like organisms in their own right. You know, they're made out of people and buildings and cultural beliefs and behaviors. And so therefore they don't immediately step out and look like a tiger to people.
Like it's not obvious at first that you're dealing with this thing that has its own goals. And it's not necessarily even aware of you in the way that you're not necessarily aware of the bug living in your eyelashes. You know, so like, yeah, where are we with respect to that particularly love, crafty and notion? And how is that going to shape?
And I was like, when people, last piece on this is, because when people talk about, oh, all we got to do is get together in this humanist fantasy that somehow if we all just like stand in line behind Greta Thunberg, that like, we're going to be able to solve this. And it's like humans have not been at the wheel of civilization since it was civilization. Like the whole time it's been driven by these things that we're participating in and don't really have total control over. So that's really, that's my belief.
And I'm curious where you guys see that fitting into understanding what's coming and what forces kind of can be worked with and what forces can't be worked with. Well, I mean, I can give a shout out. And that like it ties into definitely some thoughts I've had specifically around the rise of disinformation and the extreme prevalence of people wanting to believe the disinformation and believe every conspiracy theory, no matter how plausible or not. And for before people know, I was telling everybody that the NSA was spying on them years before Snowden's revelation.
So I'm not against conspiracy theories when they're true. I'm against them when there is no rational evidence. And I really think I do agree with some of these reactionary types in that I agree that we aren't necessarily thinking in an enlightenment frame of mind, but more a medieval frame of mind. But not for the reasons they think of like, oh, well, traditional Western civilization and that whole dog whistle is under threat.
What I think of it more is that the epistemic chaos of that people rightfully can't agree on objective truth because as many philosophical schools have successfully just put it completely to bed like the postmodernists or even earlier somebody like Victor Stein, we can never find objective truth. But I basically think most people, even though we think we're living in this secular age where people are becoming less religious, I don't actually think that's true. I think people still have as religious a minds as ever. What has changed is what the agent that is blamed for the misfortune is in the past, in if my home gets washed away in a flood, I clearly didn't give enough offerings to the River deity.
Now when my home gets washed away in the flood, it's the evil company running the dam up the road that did it or it's the evil political party that didn't fund safety inspections. Regardless of now, maybe it's true. That's why it happened. But people don't actually need evidence to believe those things.
We've replaced God's make bad people happen with people I don't like make bad things happen. It is the same worldview. You've just replaced who the subject of your misfortune is. See what David thinks now.
Oh, man, I think a lot. First of all, I'm just going to say that I don't know about anyone else. But when I started giving tribute to the River deity in 2020, it. My life started turning around for the best.
Pass the hat. But something that I kind of have been playing with ever since I started reading, Daniel C. Dennett's work. I don't know if he's really with him, but he's a neuropsychologist, neuroscientist.
I was tweeting him the other day. You wait what? I was tweeting him. I was disagreeing with him on Twitter.
And of course, he's never going to respond. Okay. I'm glad because I've since found better neuropsychologists to kind of like latch on to rationally. But yes, he is really aggressive towards the supernatural for no good reason and I don't get it.
It's always going to turn off. But I just stayed for the science talk. Turn on friendly towards the supernatural. He'll learn.
The idea that the inhuman entities, I'm just going to call them entities. I think markets are entities. I think that institutions are entities. Our entities is our, I don't know what the correct, the correct way to say that is, but I think that what the internet has done is initially it gave those entities a more tangible form and that cyber realm, these entities have synthesized and made it and evolve and created new things that like you guys are saying, we don't know what we're really dealing with.
I think that what can be worked with though is that what we do know and I hate to sound to humanizing in this aspect, but is that we're all literal data points, whether or not you use social media or anything else, your tax information, your pay information, your social security number, all that stuff is kept somewhere in some data bank somewhere. And someone is buying that data from whoever has it and using it to create these devices and these tools that exist in society. I think that once we, I genuinely believe that people don't feel empowered to like actually believe that they can make a difference in the world they live in. And I think that by accepting that we are both axiones and dendrites and that we're always receiving and giving out information, once we actually take responsibility for how we're affecting each other with our own internals of that and cognitive experiences, I think that that's self-work and then genuinely acting out of a place of healed.
I just want to see my neighbor or the person across the table, the person wherever else, what food in their mouth and water and a place to stay. I think that once that notion becomes normalized, because honestly that's been beaten out of us, we've been conditioned to, I mean, we live in a state, Texas, I know you don't, but we live in a state where I think it's arguable that firearms are more accessible than any kind of mental health assistance or aid. I hear you can only own six dildos. Yeah, let me tell you.
That's a travesty. But I think that once we start taking responsibility for ourselves and how we're affecting each other with our six dildos and our firearms and our non-mental health accessible system, then let's hold us to imagine we're superheroes. We're all the Justice League. We're all here.
We're all affecting each other's lives. We're all reality workers. You're talking about the superheroes thing, and I don't know if you're familiar with the Rice University philosopher and religious scholar Jeffrey Kreipel, but Jeff Kreipel has written about this, about the return of the superhero archetype and why now. It seems obvious to me, let's set the whole multiverse thing apart, because that's very interesting, but that's sort of a fold in this other thing, which is that clearly each of us is aware on some level that the promise of modern technology as a force multiplier, as something that would allow, I don't know if any of you have seen that online widget that's your slave calculator.
It's like how many slaves you have without realizing it, meaning how much invisible infrastructure is required in order to support your lifestyle. We drive around cars with 400 horsepower. Where are those calories coming from? They're being extracted out of the top soil and out of mineral deposits, and we are literally just chewing up the surface of this planet and squeezing as many jewels out of it as we can.
So there's a superhero thing and supervillain thing in that, which is that all of us have now grown up in the shadow of John Nash, this brilliant mathematician who helped pioneer game theory and helped during the Cold War establish a theory of mutually assured destruction. This idea that if both sides are equally well-armed and each side could blow up the world, then nobody's going to do it. For years, I thought when I was a Google Glass Explorer back in 2013, I really thought that the solution to the surveillance capitalism problem was I had a John Perry Barlow attitude about it. I was like, well, we just need to, he's a, you know, I grew up on a Wyoming cattle ranch.
He was very pro-everyone being equally well-armed, and everyone knowing everyone else's secrets. I'm at a point now, nine years later where I accepted that's true, but not completely true. And that it has to be held in tension with this other truth, which is that those kinds of arms races tend to accelerate over a cliff. You can't necessarily ensure that everyone is operating according to the same rationale.
You can't assume that every equally well-armed person has the same sort of local reasoning and personal history and biased condition calculus about how they're going to make their decisions. And so, you know, you get, you get people, and this is what I love about modern superhero fiction, which is that it's actually done a really good job of showing the sort of magnio component, which is the, like, this is why this person thinks they're doing the right thing. This is why this, like, this is, I got a buddy who's like, you know what, say what you will put in the monster, we're monsters too. He's justified in feeling like the whole world is ganging up on him.
And you know, I don't know, geopolitics is well enough to participate in those conversations, but I can't say that. I think it's almost a law of physics that if you really knew why someone was doing this horrible thing that they were doing, then, you know, you would be able to respond better than if you can't. And so, the point is that I feel like what the whole superhero thing is that all of us are becoming these incredibly powerful beings, even if we exist sort of at the bottom of this turtle pile of even more powerful people, you know, and we are being forced to reckon with that. And none of us seem, none of us, I mean, you may be, you do, but very few of us seem like we've actually sat with this challenge, this like spiritual question of what it means to be extremely powerful and to have this influence that you can't possibly fully understand on the rest of the world and to accept it, you know, some of us probably do need to be like locked in a plastic box or whatever, like, you know, like, this is not just about giving everyone an AR-15, this, you know, it's not going to work.
You know, so anyway, that's a lot of sort of different angles on a thing, but I'm curious to hear you speak to that about technological empowerment and the sort of challenge to personal development that required thereby. So I'm gonna, this is, I think this is gonna be like the ground that I'm gonna stand on for the most of the conversation, but somatic experiences, somatic and emotional experiences, I think that once people recognize that that is so prominent in our decision making and that, that makes us fragile, I think that means we're gonna have to live our own fragility. And I think that by looking at our own fragility, living at our own ability and probably the following part, I think that that allows us, that gives us space to be more compassionate with ourselves and inherently gives us more space to be compassionate with other people. And so instead of looking for solutions where we have to overpower other people, we'll, we'll be more, we'll be more liable, not that we necessarily 100% will, but coming from that space, you'll be more liable to look for solutions that involve actually respecting and fighting some kind of genuine reconciliation with an opposing party.
And on your point on Putin, I'm just gonna say that he hasn't done anything that every other major world leader has been doing for the past a very long time. So he's very justified being everything. I'm not just fighting any kind of unripe violations, but I will say that he's not done anything worse than anyone else. So right, plucked the Guantanamo out of your own eye first, or the 1973 Chilean Revolution that we all, you see, I overturned it.
Yeah, let's just put vampires in the Philippines and convince them that, yeah, no, I'll say that for another reason. Yeah, I mean, you know, my only asterisk I add to those sort of thoughts is like, well, you know, he's still murdering people in Ukraine. I sort of put it as like, the US is unjust as horrible as stuff. But I don't think that equals, well, then clearly we should have a moral race to the bottom where like now everything horrible is okay.
But there is a truth that like, I mean, people criticized Soviet Russia because it was a surveillance state and then we weren't our own NSA was doing the exact same thing. So that there is some moral hypocrisy there. And I think also, oh, there's so many threads I could go with, you said, but like the superhero mentality of thinking that single uber-minches or great men of history to use the sexist 19th century phrase, this idea that we can solve problems with brilliant people probably embodied most today and Elon Musk is going to save us. I mean, he literally was an Iron Man 2 in a cameo and go back to the superheroes, but like, I think like, so for instance, like one thing F really fights for is like in the end encryption, which is a defensive technology, not an offensive technology.
It helps preserve people's privacy. And I think we keep seeing, you know, law enforcement keeps asking for these back doors in violation of math and computer science and physics of you cannot make a backdoor that only the good guys can open. Once it's there, anyone can open it. But I think they have this weird superhero idea of like, well, we'll just use it to catch bad guys and nobody will be hurt by this.
But there's collateral damage to vulnerable people. I mean, like, we literally live in a state right now where women need encryption to get access to vital healthcare to get in abortion when they need it. And you know, their privacy, their protection, literally the encryption is a shield for them. And so I think too much the superhero myth creates this idea that offensive action is the solution.
When I think a lot of times it's about defensive action, because as you correctly said, we're grappling with we're all sort of slowly becoming technological gods. We can broadcast our voice anywhere on the planet. We can personally wield the firepower of what would have been an entire army a few centuries ago. We're all becoming incredibly powerful.
And it turns out with power comes responsibility. That even includes free speech. I believe you can say anything you want. But do I think that there should not ever be any consequences for what you say?
No, I just said your words are powerful. They're literally a magic spell. Are you casting dark magic with them quite literally? Once again, I'm going to bring up Karwin, who people often like to say, well, he was the ultimate offender of saying anything horrible you want.
He literally had a comedy routine where he said every single slur about every single group in a row. So they look at that and go see he thinks we can say anything. But I think then to an incredibly wonderful interview he gave in 1990 when he was being asked to respond to the at the time controversial comedy of Andrew Dies Clay where he was asked like, well, you know, what do you think all the people who say and everything he's saying is sexist is vile, et cetera. And Karwin said, well, first of all, I fully support his right to say it.
He should not be arrested for this. There should be no laws against him saying it. But but I think like he should maybe think about what he's saying because traditionally comedy has been used to attack the powerful and he's picking on powerless people. So can he say it?
Yes. But should he say it? I don't know. I mean, and also when you start dehumanizing people, it's a slippery slope.
Like Andrew Dies Clay should remember that he's Jewish and you know, the kind of language he's using the dehumanizes people have used it on people like him. So it's like, yes, we all should be able to wield our own power. But that is not mean that if we use our power responsibly that everybody else doesn't have a right to be very angry at us. Yeah.
So okay. So I'm going to get hipster here and I apologize if folks haven't caught this cultural reference, but I really want to speak to this through Wonder Woman 1984 because you're talking about like the importance of war superhero movie ever. Really? And my personal.
Let me talk about it. Let me talk about it not as a critic of superhero films, but as someone who sees the predictive programming of large Hollywood projects as a way for the collective to process matters of importance. Like, which is again why I think the multiverse thing is so big right now. Why?
Why we had everything everywhere at once and Dr. Strange multiverse of madness in theaters at the same time. And like Rick and Morty was on Netflix and like, what is going on here? It's like because all of us are dealing with the implications of this 20th century physics revolution has caught up with us culturally and we're realizing that we live in some kind of a splintered reality with all of these forks and all that people living in the same family.
You go home for Thanksgiving and you're like, you guys don't live in the same universe as I do anymore. And so this is how we're dealing with this stuff. And I think, okay, so Wonder Woman 1984, first of all Wonder Woman, right? She's just like a Jedi, right?
She's got all the defensive tools. She has the shield. The lasso is just used there to contain people. It's not like Batman or doesn't have guns and then she's just like mowing down with the Baba Bill.
No, no, this is somebody who is really committed to nonviolence ultimately and as far as that can be carried, you know, minimal force. We fund the police, you know, not just like leave your kids to get attacked, but train people to deescalate conflict, to mediate conflict. And so I love that about that character, but in this film in particular, I appreciated, regardless of how it was executed for fans, let's just be clear, like, it's nice to see a film that's not entirely about fan service that actually can speak to people outside of the zone of that history of appreciation of that particular. But at any rate, so that story is all about the villain has become a kind of wishful filling genie type character that is capable of granting wishes to anyone.
And what happens when this person becomes so powerful and can empower everyone else in the world through broadcast media, you know, with something about 1984 that my buddy Jeff Martell has spoken about and stranger things and cultural fascination with the year that the Apple computers ad ran on the Olympics, you know, there was like a pivotal moment, you know, there was, you know, a challenger was not far behind that. And you know, aliens and Terminator was that your aliens with 86. Anyway, there's something about the mid 80s and like the moment that we realized we were passing over this Rubicon. And now we're capable of having these conversations about, oh my God, what happened?
What happens if everybody gets what they want, you know, and just to be a total dick. This is another Michael Creighton novel, Sphere, spoiler, because this is another thing we're reckoning with, what happens when all of us, like whatever we imagine comes true, you've got ass hats out there like Transhumanist Jason Silva, who are so excited about the fact that technology, that the gap between our ability to conceive a thing and to make it a physical object is getting smaller all the time. It's like, yeah, but you're a teenager, like you're an emotional adolescent, you know, you don't want to die. Why should I trust anyone who is so afraid of death with the ability to 3D print anything they can imagine?
You know, that seems like a bad idea. And so that's kind of just, you know, that's my rant. It's not exactly a question. But I mean, I think it's so important in the conversation around why I appreciated Wonder Woman 1984, was that it's ultimately addressing the same thing as Jurassic Park, which is or Sphere or these other things, which is like what happens when like, ultimately, you know, the technology is going to keep evolving, whether we want it to or not.
And it seems like the situation that we're in, other than playing the work of triage and putting our fingers in the dam where we, you know, in order to prevent it from, you know, flooding a village, is this other thing, which is how, you know, how do we become more aware? How do we become less reactive to the desires that are presented to us? How do we become more responsible and less reactive, maybe? There, I have a lot of ideas that I think that one of them, one of the more cohesive and universal ones is conditioning a healthy sense of skepticism.
I find myself constantly asking myself, is that really what I want to do right now? Is that really what I want? And then actually thinking about the consequences of my actions? And that usually like saves me for a lot of ways to talk.
But also, it's easier for me to do that when I'm like at the grocery store because I'm already primed with the, oh man, they're just going to give me this minute as much as they possibly can. And I'm like, oh man, I'm going to get the grocery store upset and ready to just like resist. So that just, yeah, really, you have no idea. I went to Times Square and it was just, I had my shields up.
I was doing indentations. I was like, oh, that's him. That's him. But no, I think that like just, and this is not the final step, but the first step is accepting that there are a lot of institutions of power that want to take advantage of you and your resources to survive.
And then having that in the back of your head as long as you possibly can, as much as possible, well, hold the space for you to be able to tell yourself, no, what to really say. Maybe I should really rethink this before I make a hard decision on how I feel about this. And a lot I could think and do with that. I guess I first will just be inspired to say that, well, you know, the, it's a very resonant theme in fiction, which you're alluding to, not just like Wonder Woman in 1984 or even Jurassic Park or what have you, but it's the strain of techno utopianism that you can find it in many different genres.
But it is this idea that if I just had enough power, I could make the world better. And the ultimate flaw in that is many great stories that pointed out is the very active gaining power makes you no longer capable of the discernment to actually do good by others. You set yourself apart from the very people you're trying to help. This is ultimately what the temptation of the ring and the word of the rings is about.
It's how it corrupts people. They dream they could use it for good and eventually it uses them. It's the same idea in Ursula Gewegwin's The Laid of Heaven, the idea that we could weaponize somebody's ability that their dreams become reality and we could fix the world. And of course, you just keep making the world worse and worse, basically, or you try to remove conflict.
But as a result, you make everyone the same, which doesn't seem like a win either. So I mean, how do we actually get there? I think a lot of it is about understanding. And once again, I'm going to go back to the phenomenologists because ultimately the phenomenologists are philosophically there at the heart of the philosophy of technology, the philosophy of the internet of transhumanism to bring it up again.
I mean, unfortunately, the most prominent philosopher of phenomenology, Merton Heidegger, was literally a Nazi. But there's a lot of very brilliant thoughts there, despite that, unfortunately. He's most famous. If you've ever heard the silly aphorism, if you have a hammer, every problem was like a nail, that's literally from Heidegger's being in time.
But basically, it's the idea that technology, both physical and mental technology, literally shifts our perceptions of what it means to be ourselves. Like, they've studied this in like with road rage. The part of what drives road rage is people become embodied in the car. The car becomes their body.
And so they get angry when another car gets too close to them because they literally feel like it's in their face, literally. And so I think a lot of what we're dealing with with the current internet, the way it's built, is literally changing our minds in ways that incentivize adverse and negative behaviors. Like, why did the old internet feel less toxic? Well, I don't know.
In the old forum systems, there was no algorithmic amplification paid for. There was no liking. There was no easy ability to track someone everywhere they went in the forum to harass them if you didn't like what they said. The system, the literal system by which we were communicating facilitated healthier dialogue than the systems by which we're now using.
So I think a lot of what we need to do is think long and hard about how current social media networks operate and how we can maybe shift how they function technologically to incentivize the better angels of our nature, as it were. So that's a great place to lead into the last question I have for you, just because we do actually have a hard limit on the 5% left on my iPad. That's two point earlier about that, you know, we're all bound by entry. I'm being censored, Michael, by your laptop.
This is censorship. I won't stand for it. Yeah, yeah, take it to court. So basically what it seems like we all agree with, to some extent, is that the solution is somehow having the wisdom or the incentives shaping our decision making to put some of these genies back in the bottle.
And to me, it's sort of like, well, that's not what happens. It's the second law of thermodynamics. You can kind of locally reduce entropy, but then you're actually making more disorder outside of your gated neighborhood again. And eventually that comes back.
And so part of it is like, I wonder to what extent, to get to your point about the more power and things getting more complicated and worse, it seems like anything that we can do to stop the collapse of these unsustainable snowballing processes is actually going to just hasten them. But I don't want to come up as a binary of like between collapse and success somehow, because there's so many different dimensions and degrees to which a system can fall apart and then new things can grow in the space made by that fallen tree or whatever. So it's not like, you know, like one tree at a time can collapse. The whole forest ecosystem doesn't have to collapse at once.
And sometimes collapse is good, right? Because the new trees can come up. And so this is a bloated metaphor. But like, what do you see as possibly some optimism or like, so what are some hopeful places to draw our attention to in terms of things that maybe we would be okay with allowing to collapse or, you know, because otherwise they're not going to stop on their own, you know, maybe, I don't know.
This is a weird, unwieldy question. Oh, no, I have lots of thoughts on it. Well, first of all, what does keep me someone optimistic? Believe it or not, it is as a student of history, knowing that it's crazy and weird and unstable grandos we all feel right now, knowing that we have gone through a epistemological crisis of this nature before and we survived as a species, albeit it got pretty bad.
The last major one of these in Europe with the invention of the printing press eventually undermined the authority of the Catholic Church and literally led to the 30 years war, which killed like a quarter of Europe. I'd really rather it doesn't get that bad. But I'd also remind us, well, we're a long way from it getting that bad the last time this happened. So I mean, what can we actually do?
I mean, so I want to touch on a few points as the last question here that we just haven't gotten to because there's a lot of misconceptions on this. I want people to understand it. Why is it so hard to make healthy social media and why is peer relying on the First Amendment not going to help here? Well, a lot of things that people don't want on their social media are legal under the First Amendment.
For instance, spam protected under the First Amendment. It is not the legal speech. You could literally flood a social network with nothing but bullshit spam and scams and you're not violating the First Amendment. Also pornography, not against the First Amendment.
You could put nothing but pornographic content and links on it. You're not violating the First Amendment. But most people when they're not going to a porn website don't want to see that. Similarly, hate speech, not against the First Amendment, but most people rightfully don't want that in their community.
So, the problem is to make an actual positive environment online, we can't just rely on the First Amendment, which is where I very much disagree with certain people like you on Musk. He talks about banning bots. Those are protected under the First Amendment. He says, we'll just do what the First Amendment says.
He doesn't know what the First Amendment says. Basic, well, yes, that's another matter. But basically what I think we- We don't have a rocket either. Let's not get ourselves.
What I think we need to do to try to end on a positive note is what would be good to collapse. I think social media is that currently exists would be good to collapse. We need a new life on to emerge. I highly recommend people to look into a concept that has been written about a lot in the peer to peer web 3.0 space that Cory Docker is a champion of called subsidiary.
But it is- and it's also related to a concept that tech hurts my magic champions called protocols, not platforms. The basic ultimate idea is social media needs to be transformed into a federated technology just like email. It would remove almost all the problems that technology currently has and it would give people the power to define their own communities without being subject to the censorship whims of big platforms because actually misconceptions aside, because EFS studies censorship globally and despite the narrative that certain rich white men would promote, it is primarily marginalized communities who are censored online. The vast majority of online censorship is from people of color, from women, from LGBT people, poor people, etc.
That is the bulk of the censorship. A few rich people with a megaphone are distorting this conversation. And so I think what we need to do is build, empower people to communicate with who they want to communicate with and not communicate with who they don't want to communicate with. Because it's not just free speech, it's free association as well.
That is an equally important right. If I am forced to listen to you, my rights are just as being violated as if I'm forced to shut up. So I think we need to empower people to have their own social media communities. So just real quick, I find it funny.
While I was doing some research, I found that there was a pharmaceutical company in the 70s that wanted to publish their prices. And it was illegal because the government didn't think that allowing that information to exist and be accessible to people would foster a healthy practice of pharmaceutical things. But one of the things that came out of that case was that the first amendment is applied as much as the listener, the listener is entitled to what the speaker has to say, at least in a commercial sense. That's just something to sit on for a little bit, kind of makes a net.
But because I don't want to hear what every company has to say to me that's trying to sell something to me. But anyway, I think that I don't know what needs to collapse. But I can say that I see a lot of hope and that there are discussions like this happening because that means that we still have the capacity to ask the question. And as far as long as we have the capacity to ask the question, we will have the capacity to find a solution.
And the solution might not be perfect. I can pretty much guarantee it won't be perfect. I second that. There is no perfect solution.
Anybody who tells you otherwise is selling you something. Yes, but no. But again, as long as we're asking the question, we're still making investments and at least personal actions to kind of subvert things, that's where the hope is. To quote Camu, one must imagine, says, if this is happy.
I love that. I saw that on the t-shirt at the Oregon Eclipse Festival in 2017. Anyway, I would like to ask the two of you just quickly. If you have not said anything in this hour plus that you feel is really important to say now is your chance before the iPad dies.
I mostly try to get all the things I had and said I wanted to say in the last question. And I guess I will just end with a brief advertisement for EFF. If you have spare money, give it to EFF because they're the people doing the real important work. But if you're listening from Austin, reach out to us.
We have a website. Please get in touch. But also just follow EFF and follow the thinkers in this space who I really think are advancing this conversation positively and deepening the conversation. So we've alluded to the thoughts a lot of people in this conversation, but I encourage you to research the writings and works of Corey Doctorow, of Mike Masnick, of Cindy Khan, of Soshan Azubov, et cetera.
Really smart people grappling with these things who understand that we keep getting told that this subject of free speech is so easy. And I think it's like everything seems very simple when you're a kid and it's just explained to you. And so you realize that actually there's always a complex competing network of people's rights and obligations to each other. And so this is not easy.
And people telling us it is easy are wrong. And actually, okay, final thing, I can say it for a crash is so one thing EFF works to protect is Section 230 of the CDA. I don't have full time to get into that law or the history of it. But it basically has to do with websites both cannot be punished for not moderating, but they also can't be punished for moderating their platforms.
And this is very important. We can't have user-generated content sites without this law because it opens websites up to too much liability. You can't have social media or comment sections of any kind without this law. And both Republicans and Democrats hate this law for different reasons.
Republicans hate it because it lets Twitter kick Donald Trump or Alex Jones off and the left tends to hate it because it lets toxic, vile voices not be kicked off that the platform doesn't want to kick them off. And I'm certainly far more sympathetic to the left wing impulse there than the right. But it's a law that's one of these things where it's like once again we talk about imperfect. I will acknowledge there's probably times where that law has let some shady, terrible people get away with stuff they shouldn't.
But at the end of the day, it is what allows all of us to freely speak online. Companies couldn't host us in our speech without this protection. So there are better ways to solve some of these free speech issues than getting rid of that law. And if you want to know more about it, I suggest you sincerely research it, especially look into the career of Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon who is probably our best Senator on digital civil liberties issues.
He is awesome. He's basically the EFF Senator. But he crafted this law back in the late 90s. And he's really thoughtful on these issues.
And I really encourage you to read his own writings and thoughts on why he crafted this law the way he did. It's a law that keeps us safe, lets us all express ourselves. It's not perfect. But getting rid of it is not going to make either side of the political spectrum happy with what the consequences would be.
David, take us out. Where it is power, where it has been power since the whole G. has been the heart of Raw, since Hermes has been the messenger of the Greek gods and since Enoch has said it to the mediteron, where it has always been an extremely important thing to various cultures. And we all have it.
We all have speech. We have a ability to communicate. So we should all treat that as a powerhouse and just be really responsible with the things that we say and communicate. Thank you both for being here.
And thanks everybody for listening. Now and in the future. Yeah. Thanks again for listening.
If you want more, my latest essay, The Future Is Noisy, was just published in Return.Life. I've been experimenting with Mid Journey, which is a platform for AI, text, image artwork. Recordings from the last book club call will be out on Patreon soon. And in many other axes and dimensions, I look forward to exploring creative unfolding together with you.
Stay in touch and wiggle your toes.