WatchCats Henry Farrell: Weaponizing Infrastructure, Controlling Chokepoints, "Efficiency" as Governance | WatchCats #2
We're back! After reacting to Elon Musk's latest Bart Simpson level trolling on X, we talk briefly on how we're going to ramp up production in order to meet the deluge of news and noise coming out of DOGE.
Our guest this week is Professor Henry Farrell, from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Prof. Farrell was the 2019 recipient of the Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Politics and Technology and his latest book (along with Prof. Abraham Newman at Georgetown) is Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.
In order to meet the weight of the current historical moment, we shifted our editorial calendar around a bit in bringing Prof. Farrell on because we think there is a deep and poorly understood connection between the norms the United States enforces on infrastructure around the world and how it treats its own deep systems.
We thought Profs. Farrell and Newman's recent post on Lawfare, "Elon Musk Weaponizes the Government" provides one of the first framework and abstraction to understand what's going on. Take a listen and let us know what you think on our socials!
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--SOCIALS--
--LINKS REFERENCED--
The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies
Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better by Jennifer Pahlka