Darts and Letters

The collapse of the crypotcurrency exchange FTX has caused major shockwaves throughout the financial world.  This has brought new attention to the ongoing reckoning around crypto, and urgency to the calls to reign in and regulate these emerging technologies. FTX’s collapse has also sparked a philosophical reckoning about the ideas that inspired their CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried. Bankman-Fried is a major proponent and funder of Effective Altruism, a philosophical and political movement that demands we give to the most effective charities. Effective Altruism started out concerning itself primarily with global poverty, inspired by the work of do-good utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer. Today, it has become something a little different. Now, the movement tells entrepreneurs like Bankman-Fried that they should ‘earn-to-give.’ Most recently, effective altruists have become increasingly focussed on longtermism, a strand of extreme utilitarian thinking advanced by Oxford-based intellectuals Nick Bostrom, Toby Ord, Will MacAskill, and others (and generously funded by Bankman-Fried). Longtermism tells us we should worry about the interests of future people — trillions of future people, 1000s of years into the future, and in planets far away. On this episode of Darts and Letters, we examine the complicated moral math of longtermism, and ask whether the utilitarian logic of Effective Altruism leads inevitably to this kind of thinking. Our guide is Émile P. Torres, a former longtermist who is now one of the movement’s sharpest apostates. Torres calls longtermism a ‘secular religion,’ and one with apocalyptical, eugenic, and potentially genocidal implications. For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page

In this engaging discussion, physicist Charles Schwartz, a founder of Science for the People, recounts his transformation from a defense researcher to a science activist during the Vietnam era. Historian Sigrid Schmalzer shares insights on the revival of the group and its radical critiques of science's ties to power. They explore the complexities of defending science today, the need for social accountability, and the influence of Marxist and feminist perspectives. Expect thought-provoking revelations on the intricacies of activism and the evolving role of scientists in society!

We have been talking a lot lately about the idea of techno-utopian thinking, but we’re coming to a somewhat surprising conclusion: there isn’t as much of it as there used to be. Our Silicon Valley tech bros have quite a curtailed vision. If they do have a utopia, it is a utopia of sustaining the unsustainable. We speak to Paris Marx of Tech Won’t Save Us on the shifting politics of Silicon Valley. We’ll traverse the intellectual history of hippies-turned-arch-capitalists, and focus especially on their ideas for transportation policy. Do they have a radical vision for a different transportation future, or is it a vision of maintain the status quo? Marx is author of the book Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation, out now from Verso Books. This is part of a wider series on techno-utopian thinking, produced with professors Tanner Mirrlees and Imre Szemen. For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page.

[You can access the full Technocracy Now! series now: part one, part two, part three] The first two episodes of this series told stories of technocrats who tied themselves to a muscular state. They believed the state could remake society, if it had the right expertise. However, the state under neoliberalism doesn’t have the technocratic ambition it used to. This just isn’t a period of grand New Deal-style programming. There is still a state, but it increasingly outsources its functions. Is technocracy dead, then? No, technocracy is just moving into the private sector. More and more of our lives are governed by unaccountable private tyrannies—tyrannies that employ ruthlessly efficient technocratic systems, with even less democratic input than the technocracies of old. For instance, many modern workplaces function like technocracies. The Amazon warehouse is the most technologically-sophisticated and totalizing manifestation of this. Their algorithmically-managed systems micro-manage workers’ every step, turning their bodies into machines. Alessandro Delfanti, author of The Warehouse: Workers and Robots at Amazon, takes us inside the new frontiers of digital Taylorism. Plus, what is the future of technocracy? An emerging slew of Peter Thiel-funded neo-reactionaries want to install a Silicon Valley CEO as our new techno-monarch. Sam Adler-Bell of Know Your Enemy argues that this marks a shift in the right-wing of Silicon Valley. They were once crudely escapist libertarians, but now they want to run our governments like their technocratic workplaces. We discuss Bell’s latest New York Times essay on Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, their broader intellectual trajectory from seasteaders to techno-populists, as well as Bell’s New York Magazine article on the liberal technocrats who want to defeat the neo-reactionaries with policies addressing disinformation. (Programming note: we have a short video documentary version of the seasteading section, available now on YouTube). This is part of a wider series on techno-utopian thinking, produced with professors Tanner Mirrlees and Imre Szemen. For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page.

[You can access the full Technocracy Now! series now: part one, part two, part three] Last episode, we looked at the technocrats of the industrial age: Thorstein Veblen, Howard Scott, and the “industrial tinkerers,” as Daniel Bell put it. But Daniel Bell went on to say we were entered a new age — a “post-industrial age” — where a new kind of technocrat would vie for power. They would develop new intellectual technologies that could be codified into complex ways of understanding, predicting, and maybe even controlling global systems. One such intellectual technology was cybernetics, the darling of mid-century technocrats. It was a theory that proposed you could understand human affairs by understanding certain mathematical relationships in a system, and the nature of how feedbacks circulated in that system. On part #2 of Technocracy Now, we tell stories of cybernetic technocracies.(Programming note: we also have a video version of this introduction, available on YouTube). First, Joy Rohde tells us the story of Charles A. McClelland, a liberal political scientists who proposed a cybernetic computer system that claimed to predict conflicts before they happened. With this information, US policy makers could usher in a new age of peace and stability (and forever ensure a US-dominated global order). The project never accomplished everything it set out to do, but it is now being resurrected behind closed doors by Lockheed Martin. It’s a techno-utopian dream of mathematical certainty in an uncertain world. Then, why not cybersocialism? In Salvador Allende’s Chile, they were building a cybernetic computer network that connected factories to state planners. It seems technocratic, but Eden Medina says that these these cyber-revolutionaries saw it as anything but. Medina is author of Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile. The book recounts the short-lived Cybersyn Project. It promised using science to develop a more rationally-ordered economy. However, it also promised to guarantee the freedom and autonomy of workers. The project was destroyed in the brutal coup of 1973. However, did it work, and is it a dream worth resurrecting? This is part of a wider series on techno-utopian thinking, produced with professors Tanner Mirrlees and Imre Szemen. For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page.

[You can access the full Technocracy Now! series now: part one, part two, part three] Technocracy is the idea that experts should govern. For the common good, presumably. It makes a certain amount of sense, given how irrational our politics seem to be right now. So, technocracy is seductive. In fact, it’s an idea as old as politics itself. We begin the first of a three-part series telling stories of technocracies past, present, and future. In this first part of this episode, Ira Basen tells us the story of Technocracy, Inc. This 1930s movement aimed to install non-democratic North American “technate” where we only work from the ages of 25 to 45, for 16 hours a week. It might surprise you to learn that Elon Musk’s grandfather was one of its leaders. Basen produced an extended CBC: Ideas documentary on the movement, and it’s worth checking out. (Programming note: we also have this full story produced as a video documentary, on YouTube). Then, perhaps the most influential intellectual today: Noam Chomsky. What is the place of technical expertise in a radical left project?  Chomsky’s famous “Responsibility of Intellectuals” is one of the best critiques of the liberal technocratic intelligentsia. However, his lesser-known writing on Mikhail Bakunin’s predictions about how the Marxist intellectual vanguard would “beat the people with the people’s stick” offers a warning to left technocrats.  We have a wide-ranging conversation with Professor Chomsky on his critique of intellectuals, the place of technical expertise in a radical left project, his anarchist theory of expertise, and his thoughts on popular reason and popular intelligence. (Programming note: we also have this extended video interview, also available on YouTube). This is part of a wider series on techno-utopian thinking, produced with professors Tanner Mirrlees and Imre Szemen. For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page.

Technocracy is the idea that experts should govern. For the common good, presumably. It makes a certain amount of sense, given how irrational our politics seem to be right now. So, technocracy is seductive. In fact, it’s an idea as old as politics itself, and it emerges just about everywhere — left, right, and somewhere in between. From Plato’s philosopher kings, to Soviet economic planners, the cybernetic dreams of Cold War liberals, and today’s algorithmically-governed workplaces. So next episode, we begin a three-part series telling stories of technocracies past, present, and future. We’ll start with the purest expression of technocracy: Technocracy, Inc. This 1930s movement aimed to install non-democratic North American “technate” where we only work from the ages of 25 to 45, for 16 hours a week. It might surprise you to learn that Elon Musk’s grandfather was one of its leaders. The movement was short-lived, but many of its assumptions live on through the New Deal, Cold War liberalisms, and the dreams of our new technocratic overlords. Like Elon Musk’s proposed ‘Martian technate,’ Peter Thiel’s floating platforms in the ocean where Silicon Valley “seasteaders” give government an ‘operating system update,’ to the emerging neoreactionaries that hope to install a techno-monarch. This is our biggest production yet, so we’ve got some of our biggest guests. Including Noam Chomsky, who has long been a critic of unaccountable expert authority. Part 1 of Technocracy Now! starts Monday, 3rd October on our main feed, but you can listen now on our Patreon. Episodes will be released weekly for the next three weeks. —————————-CREDITS—————————- For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page.

Researchers with the best of intentions still get things wrong. “Who made you the expert” is a valid question that research subjects might ask… and frankly, they’re right to ask that. If you’re, say, a drug user in Vancouver’s downtown east side you probably don’t want some guy from Harvard telling you what paternalistic research he’s doing on you. You want to be a partner in research done with you. So what does it look like when the old paternalistic ways are dispensed of? Garth Mullins hosts Crackdown, a podcast about the drug war in Vancouver covered by the drug users themselves. Gordon talks to him about being the researcher and the researched in the downtown east side, a place where activists and academics have come together to develop better methods. We also talk to Michelle Fine of City University of New York. She’s a leading proponent of “critical participatory action research“. That’s a way of researching that de-centres the academic. We find out the theory, and what that means for expertise more broadly. Special thanks to Samona Marsh, one of the authors of Research 101: A process for developing local guidelines for ethical research in heavily researched communities, and also to Liz Dozier of Chicago Beyond. Liz and Samona’s work was really important to this episode even if we couldn’t get their voices to air. ——————-SUPPORT THE SHOW————————- We need your support. If you like what you hear, chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patreon subscribers usually get the episode a day early, and sometimes will also receive bonus content. Don’t have the money to chip in this week? Not to fear, you can help in other ways. For one: subscribe, rate, and review our podcast. It helps other people find our work. —————————-CREDITS—————————- For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page.

Recently a major outage took nearly a third of Canada offline. No phone, no internet… even access to 911 got shut down in some places, all thanks to Rogers Media Inc. But why does one company get so much control over a vital service like the Internet in the first place? This is the story in the USA as well as Canada – our digitized lives are all being held captive by a tiny number of huge corporations. We at Darts don’t necessarily believe the market is the solution here. But if the market isn’t, what is? How do we make a more democratic, socially driven Internet? Gordon Katic interviews Ben Tarnoff, author of Internet for the People, to help us answer these questions – and most importantly, we ask whether the internet is indeed a series of tubes. Read Ben’s book, and keep up with his work on his website. —————————-CREDITS—————————- For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page.

The term “metaverse” was coined in a 1993 science fiction novel. Since then, it’s grown from a dystopian literary concept to a reality that corporations want to sell you. Strap on some VR goggles and escape your tired analog life! Except that the systemic issues we already have seem to be creeping into the metaverse, too. As the lines between virtuality and physicality continue to blur, companies like Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta are setting their sights on virtual worlds. It’s a new frontier, full of potential – and full of our valuable data. Metaverses like Second Life or World of Warcraft can be positive and even game-changing experiences on the individual level, but when it comes to the navigating a virtual society with a capitalist backdrop…things get a bit dicey. On this episode, guest host and producer Ren Bangert explores the metaverse. First, we hear a love story from the glory days of Second Life, told to us by Sandrine Han – a scholar of virtual worlds and a long-time Second Lifer. Then, writer and game developer Ian Bogost takes us on a deep dive into the corporatization of the metaverse. We’ll hear how the metaverse has grown from a dystopian warning from science fiction to a sinister data-mining reality – and how even the shiniest of tech utopias are still functioning under the same old capitalism. ——————-FURTHER READING, LISTENING AND WATCHING—————— Check out Ian Bogost’s article “The Metaverse is Bad” in The Atlantic. Ian’s got lots of excellent reading content listed on his website – perfect for a deep dive into game theory. For a further imagining of democracy in a metaverse, check out Eliane Boey’s short story “The Forgotten”. You can read it in Clarkesworld Magazine, or listen to an audio version on the Clarkesworld podcast. Watch the Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern get trapped in the metaverse for 24 hours. It’s a an emotional rollercoaster. Han, H. C. (2013). Visual learning in the virtual world: The hidden curriculum of imagery in Second Life. Immersive Environments, Augmented Realities and Virtual Worlds: Assessing Future Trends in Education. http://www.igi-global.com/chapter/visual-learning-virtual-world/74048 Stephenson, N. (1993). Snow Crash. New York: Bantam Books. ——————-ABOUT THE SHOW—————— For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page.