Tech Won't Save Us - Mark Zuckerberg is Burning Meta to the Ground w/ Dave Karpf

Episode Date: October 27, 2022

Paris Marx is joined by Dave Karpf to discuss Meta’s misguided attempt to turn Facebook into a metaverse company, how Wired Magazine has evolved, and why the tech billionaires are destroying the world.Dave Karpf is an Associate Professor of Media and Public Affairs, George Washington University. He’s also the author of The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy and Analytic Activism: Digital Listening and the New Political Strategy. Follow Dave on Twitter at @davekarpf.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.Also mentioned in this episode:Dave wrote about the history of WIRED Magazine’s future predictions and why VR never dies.People Make Games made a video looking at what’s going on in VRChat.Meta’s legs demo wasn’t real.Douglas Rushkoff’s new book Survival of the Richest looks at how the rich are trying to protect themselves from the crises they’re making worse.Science fiction books mentioned: Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, and William Gibson’s The Peripheral.Support the show

Some of the largest companies in the world that are barely suppressed monopolies that I think do harm and also I just in general don't like are going to burn themselves to the ground trying to force everyone to use a product that nobody wants to use. That is fucking funny. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Dave Karp. Dave is an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University and the author of two books, The Move on Effect and Analytic Activism. In this conversation, we talk about a lot of things. It's a really wide-ranging discussion, but one that I really enjoyed and I think that you're really going to enjoy as well. We start by discussing the history of VR and in particular, a project that Dave embarked on where he read through all of Wired magazine since its beginning back in the early 1990s. And what he learned about,

you know, the Wired ideology over that time, how it approached technology, its constant interest in, you know, the next big thing, and then how those futures, those supposed ways that technology was going to make the world so much better just wouldn't arrive and would flame out. And then there'd have to be a new thing to kind of pick up on it. We discuss science fiction and how so many of these tech founders and tech leaders are inspired by these particular visions, but also how they're really narrow, right, in the kind of worlds that they prescribe to us and lead the tech elite to try to realize. We talk a lot about the really dystopian futures that those tech leaders are trying to bring into being, right,

and how they imagine them to be positive things for themselves while trying to carve the rest of us out of any kind of good society, right? They're trying to escape the consequences of their own actions, something that Douglas Rushkoff has written about in his recent book and that we discuss in this conversation, and how that's really not about trying to create a better world, but just to insulate them from the consequences of their actions, really. And we wrap up by talking about the metaverse, you know, Mark Zuckerberg's big plan for this virtual world, what it's actually going to look like, and how people like

Zuckerberg and even Elon Musk with Twitter are burning massive amounts of money right now in really poorly thought through plays for their idea of what the future or how we communicate should look. So yeah, this is just to say that we talk about a whole load of things. It is a lot of fun, I think. Dave has a ton of insights to share. And I think that you're going to enjoy it as much as I did.

So if you like this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show so I can continue to have these conversations with Dave so we can ensure that these critical perspectives on the tech industry are getting out there, getting into the wider public, you can support that work by joining people like Matt Snyder by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us, where you can become a supporter. I've noticed that the listenership of the show has been, you know, steadily growing over recent months as it has before that. And that's so fantastic to see because it means that these conversations, these really important,

critical, deep dives into the tech industry, into the ideologies of the people behind it are reaching even more people. And that is as important now as ever. And your support helps to ensure that I can keep doing it, that we can keep having these conversations. So if you're new to the show, if you've been listening for a long time and you haven't considered supporting the work that goes into making it, go on over to patreon.com slash tech won't save us. And if you support at $5 a month or above, I'll even send you some stickers in the mail. So thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Dave, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Long time listener. Thanks for having me.

Awesome. Thanks for listening to the show. Happy to have you on the show. You know, you have written a bunch about VR, the history of VR, Wired Magazine itself, a lot for us to dig into in this conversation. And I think it's a good time to talk about it because I think it's fair to say the metaverse is kind of imploding. People aren't really buying into what Mark Zuckerberg is trying to sell us with this vision of the future he's kind of bet the whole meta or Facebook company on. And yeah, I think it's time for us to dig into that and to really see how there's some historical parallels to this that we might want to pick up on. And so I want to start with that history, right? You know, you've written about the history of VR and comparing this to the metaverse. When you looked at the history of VR, what did you see there? What happened the last time that VR was supposed to be a big thing? And why ultimately didn't that happen? So my introduction to the history of VR came through a project that I started in 2018. I'm a political scientist by training, like my job is actually

studying political organizations on the internet. But mid Trump administration, I was like, I needed a little break from that, like politics was a little too everywhere. So I decided that summer that I was going to read all of Wired Magazine chronologically to trace the history of the digital future and sort of get a sense of what are these images of how the technology is going to change the world in five to 10 years, always for the better, always a future of abundance. Like what parts have actually happened, what hasn't happened, and what's sort of the digital horizon that's always off in the distance,

promised a few years away, and why did we get it wrong? So I did that project. I wrote about it for Wired in their 25th anniversary issue in 2018. I've been following up on that on Substack recently. It's eventually going to be a book. That introduced me to the history of VR because Wired starts in 1993, which is kind of the tail end of the VR future. eventually going to be a book. That introduced me to the history of VR because Wired starts in 1993, which is kind of the tail end of the VR future. Virtual reality in the late 80s and early 1990s is the technology that everyone in Silicon Valley and tech-related Hollywood thought was coming.

Jaron Lanier was this dreadlock guy who developed the first rigs. He also, if any of your listeners are old enough to remember the Power Glove for the Nintendo, he helped come up with that. There was the movie The Lawnmower Man. So there was this sense of we're going to have an embodied internet. That is where the world is going. And in 93, they're starting to figure out that it's just not ready yet. And so I'm reading Wired Magazine in those early years, and the web isn't the thing yet. So they're still talking about VR. They're talking about VR a bunch, and they're talking about interactive TV, which also completely fizzles.

I took notes on it at the time. And one of the things that stood out is as it doesn't catch on with consumers, they pivot and they say like Howard Rangel writes this great book in I think 91 maybe about virtual reality and how like these technologists are inventing it and like just you wait, the future is about to arrive. And they're talking about how like architects are using this and scientists are using this and the military is using this. So like there's all these technical applications and just you wait, the consumer ones are going to come. It's going to change everything. And it doesn't though. Then they also sort of like the military still uses it. Like, they still set up rigs to train pilots

and, like, train people, like, using tanks. Medicine and science, like, anything with a really big research budget, like, throws a little money at it. And then it kind of disappears for a while. And as I'm reading the magazine, like, VR is kind of gone during the web one era in web two we've got that moment with second life which isn't vr but is pretty metaversy um i remember meeting a second life person at a party in like 2005 and being like yeah so like where are the samurai

swords and they immediately got the joke because like obviously they read snow crash and said let's go do that in the magazine you can sort of see the rise and fall of second life where second life is the future and like mtv and nike are setting up stores so the money's flowing in and then that future never arrives second life doesn't disappear but it stops being the future which means we stop paying attention to it and the money goes away. And so instead, there's like a community that loves Second Life and still uses it, but it's off to the side with no funding. So it doesn't get any bigger. It's just sort of off doing its own community thing. And then you have Palmer Luckey in like 2012, 2014, as this like traditional model of the like young precocious male genius who's figured it all out and oh he

happens to be like a radical conservative but we're gonna ignore that and also it looks like probably he's like a homeschooler with i think pretty rich parents but like we'll ignore that class too like social class elements they ignore all that but like he's the precocious young genius who's figured it all out and just wait and like five years it'll be here and then i see them covering facebook buying it and like oculus is'll be here and then i see them covering facebook buying it and like oculus is coming it's going to change everything that's like a cover story there's this piece in wired by kevin kelly who's the original executive editor 2016 wrote about magic leap which was ar augmented reality and then 2019 he writes this piece mirror world

about how we're about to have a digital twin of the physical realm. And that's going to be the AR VR future. It's coming. Sure, there will be ads. Sure, there'll be privacy issues. But who cares? It's going to change everything. Just get ready. Which is very old school wired because Kevin Kelly hasn't really changed at all in 30 years. His writing in 2019 is exactly like it was in 1995. I was reading all that and just thinking, this sounds like if history doesn't repeat itself, like it definitely rhymes. And my God, does this rhyme with the VR hype cycle of the late 80s or early 90s. And then it was late in the pandemic. So it was what, last summer, 2021.

I just read an online Wired piece by one of their reporters who covers VR talking about how, okay, it's five years later. We said that Oculus was going to conquer the world. How's it doing? And the piece basically said, they've sold a lot of headsets. Sure, nobody's really using it yet, but it's so early and just any minute now it's going to happen. And I just got annoyed. So I did a Twitter thread about how VR is the rich white kid of tech, that it will always be judged on its potential rather than its actual results. And that got a little bit of traction on social media. So some editors reached out and they were like, do you want to write that as an article? And I was like, do I want to be snarky in print about VR?

Yes, I definitely do. So I wrote this piece basically saying, this will never work because even though technologists read Neil Stevenson and read Ready Player One and said, that's the future, let's go build it and own it, it turns out we don't live in adventures and this thing is boring. Nobody actually wants to use it in our daily lives. It's got a demand problem that's not going to be fixed. And that got weirdly timely because that piece came out just as Zuckerberg was announcing that in the next five years, Facebook was going to transition from being a social media company to being a metaverse company. And so it was kind of this like gut check of, you know, I just published a broadside insult saying like VR is never going to happen. It's fetch, stop trying to make fetch a thing. And then he was like, I'm going to spend 10 or $15 billion a year making fetch a thing. So I had

like a deep breath of like, I guess we'll really find out now. And here we are a year into that. They've spent over $10 billion. Their finances are in the pits, and nobody wants the fucking thing. They are going to burn Facebook or Meta to the ground, trying to make everybody like a thing that just isn't very good. So yeah, that's the history in a nutshell. It rose and fall in the 80s and

90s. The tech arguably wasn't ready there, but also nobody really wanted it. And then in the 2010s, the tech got better. And the promise was like, now everyone will flood to this thing because it's so great. Throughout the pandemic, people were buying, but then not using their Oculus headsets. Because after you've used it three times, you realize like, yeah, okay, this isn't actually very fun. All the better games are not in VR. It's not good gaming. It's not good anything really. There's still small communities. I hear VR chat is a lovely place that people go and build their community the same way that people have on Second Life. But those communities can be great without it being the future. And I think we're right back where we were all those years ago, like Zuckerberg a couple weeks ago, saying that the future of the metaverse is going to be a partnership with Microsoft so that you can have your meetings in virtual space. I'm sure the companies are going to like that. I'm sure the military will buy a bunch of headsets. But that doesn't make it the future. That's just exactly what happened in the early 90s. Yeah, I think you've put it really well. And I think that you've outlined that history and the project that you embarked on in reading

Wired really well. And so before we get into discussing the metaverse and this whole project a little bit more, I did want to dig into that a little bit, right? Because you've read 25 years of Wired magazines, and I'm sure you've continued reading them since. And you talked about how Wired was very or is very techno-optimistic. You know, it's very much looking for these futures that tech can give us, how it's going to make the world a better place. This was very much kind of what it was selling the public, especially through

this period where we wanted all this tech optimism, where this was kind of what the industry wanted to sell us, wanted us to buy into, you know, their business models, their view of the world. And Wired was very much helping to do that. You know, when you were reading through this and you were seeing kind of these futures rise and fall and rise and fall and rise and fall, never arriving in many cases, did you find that there were kind of mea culpas in the magazine? Like, oh, we really thought this was going to happen. And then it didn't work out. Or was it kind of like, okay, this future didn't work out. We're just not covering it so much anymore. And now we're just going to move on

to the next thing that we're going to sell you as how tech is going to make the world such an amazing and better place. Sort of. I kind of need to periodize it. Right. So there's early Wired in the 90s, particularly the first five years under the founding editor lewis rossetto who is a deeply ideological libertarian techno-optimist and like i'm doing a slow reread of wired now to turn into a book i'm in 1994 right now and like rossetto era wired is like the california ideology on steroids. It is brash and proud. They know the future. Everybody else is an idiot who doesn't get it. There's no room really in Rosetto's Wired for admitting that they got it wrong. There's little snarky moments where every once in a while, one of their reporters or writers will note, yeah, this like this all might be bullshit it might fall

fall apart like there's little moments typically like 96 or so after the uh netscape rocket takes off on wall street you get these little moments where every once in a while people will point out like yeah this past six months went wild six months from now this all might go away and like suck.com which was like the like original proto like snarky proto blog gets started by a few hot hot wired staffers that's uh wired online magazine in the 90s and then brought within wired for like they when they realized that their staffer started it they like bought it and hosted it like suck.com was also snarky as hell in a very like bloggy almost sort of like pre-gawker style so you have those

moments where they'll at least like look askance and say like yeah do we really need to believe our own bullshit but like the ideology of there are founders and inventors and investors and like they are the engine of the of the bright and like just future and then there are like regulators and old institutions and they are the ones who stand in the way then there are regulators and old institutions, and they are the ones who stand in the way. There's a hero, there's a villain, and we are the beneficiaries of these heroes so long as we pay attention to them and clap for them.

That ideology, which we still see today from Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk, that is classic 90s-wired, and they never apologize for that. They have a little moment in 2001, because in 99 and 2000, they actually started their own index fund called the Wired Index. And they spent months and months bragging about how it was doing even better than the NASDAQ. And then when the dot-com crash and all of that gets wiped out, they did have one month where they were like, we got that wrong sorry for losing everyone all their money that's like post rosetto but still

uh in kevin kelly's era like he's still kind of dragging the ship and like 2001 2002 are kind of dark times because between the dot-com crash and september 11th like tech just doesn't really feel like the future anymore and the big things they're talking about are like napster which is like radical and cool but also like oh shit how are artists going to get paid for anything so it's like kind of like gloomier then but then you can see in the 2000s chris anderson takes over and like wired becomes one of the big drivers of web 2.0 boosterism both pointing out the legit and like Wikipedia and Craigslist, like legit new things that are happening. But also they just have a series of business style articles. He wrote Free, he wrote The Long Tail, both for the magazine and turned them into a book.

And each one of them is just sort of like, okay, well, web 1.0 happened, it's dead and gone, but everybody took the technology and is doing something new. We're about to enter this new era of abundance where everything is different. Everyone is going to be happier and rich and part of civil society. Forget that false start from the 90s. It's going to be great. They never really apologized for that. I've often said that Web 1.0 died with a bang. Web 2.0 died with a whimper. I think Web 2.0 died in like 2011, 2012, which means that all the Web 3 people like Chris Dixon, who insists that Web 3 is like up until 2020, are like, frankly, fucking idiots who just get their history wrong so they can try to get rich. Like, have me on some other time to just yell about how like Chris Dixon is wrong about

history because I need at least half an hour to yell about that. Like, his history is bonkers wrong. Them all being wrong just to try to make money. Shocking. It's like you got rich in web 2.0, like the platform era displaces web 2.0 around 2011, 2012, like a shift actually happens. You got rich off of that too. You can't just pretend that didn't happen.

Like you can remember the past 10 years that you were there for and still make money. Right. Like, come on, dude. But so like, they don't like acknowledge getting that wrong. But then around 2015, really before Trump takes over in 2015, you start to see a change in the magazine where they decide like tech is big enough, like Silicon Valley and digital is big enough now that rather than just being the like builders of the future, we're kind of responsible for the present. And they start to take social issues kind of seriously. And then in 2017, like starting with the tech lash, like it becomes a legitimately critical magazine. Like I think throughout Nick Thompson's years as editor

in chief, like some of the better, well-grounded tech criticism, long, bruising articles about fiascos at Facebook, Book, and Google are cover stories in Wired, just because the actual news has gotten dark enough, and the ideology has now receded far enough into the past that they've decided, we're going to go cover what's actually going on, it ain't good. It's noteworthy that for the 25th anniversary, they were like dave you're a snarky asshole why don't you write our history for us and we'll publish it in the magazine and like they published louis rossetto in that same issue and he was like what we need now is radical optimism because the probably like tells a story where he's complaining about this one dinner party he went to where people were

saying like wow like trump is bad and he's like throwing kids in cages and taking them away from their parents like the world is bad right now and he got like really mad both because i'm pretty sure he really likes trump but also because he's like why aren't we all excited about the future anymore it's the news's fault it's politics's fault like technology will save us so like they're publishing him as a like i think courtesy since he's the founder it's the 25th anniversary issue but then they're also like saying like hey snarky ass old dave like write a feature for us about our history like tell us what we got right and wrong like that's not a thing that would have happened in the 90s or the 2000s well actually there was like a two

year stint where they did do like mispredictions i think that was in the 20 teens but i have to double check but like there weren't moments where they were like, yeah, we got this arc of the future wrong. I'm sitting next to a bunch of my wires now. And one of the covers, it is from 2012. And it says your next car will drive itself. That happened. Yeah. Yeah. They never say like, oh yeah, it's been 10 years of us insisting that like driverless cars are about to arrive. Like why hasn't it? They never quite do that. but the coverage does change in a way that I think is noteworthy. Cause like it used to be just this font of like, frankly, ideological tech will save us garbage. And now they're like, they're not full Luddites, but they're certainly willing to be more critical because tech now runs

enough of the world to be treated responsible for the things that it gets wrong. Yeah, it's really interesting. It's an interesting shift, right? I feel like they still try to do a bit of both, right? There's some of the boosterism stuff there, but then there's the critical stuff that comes in as well. You know, as you're saying, you and Rosetto in the same issue, right? Having both of these perspectives there. I want to pick up on another piece as well. You know, you talked a lot, and this is something I've talked to other people on the show about as well, but how science fiction really plays into these ideas about what the future should look like, right? And how a lot of these tech founders have read a lot of science fiction, internalized that, and then believe that kind of part of their goal or their mission is to really realize what they've read about in these science fiction books when they were kids. And that is, of course, the case when we think about VR and metaverses and what have you. How do you see that playing out and kind of inspiring these founders, for lack of a better word? The thing that occurs to me really is I think science fiction, particularly the science fiction of the youth, provides a shared vernacular that is useful

in pitching companies and getting people to circle around the same campfire, the same idea. So in the same way that on a smaller scale, after Uber has made a ton of money, we have all these Silicon Valley pitches that are just Uber for X. And we're now seeing that all kind of like Uber's not profitable and Uber for for x no matter what x is also not profitable like we're seeing that now but like it it kind of makes sense looking back on it why uber for x was a successful pitch if we assume that the titans of silicon valley actually aren't that much smarter than the rest of us right like they don't know why these things are working so well they are making up stories of why they work so well. And then once something has worked, they convince themselves that they have it all figured out when they don't. then the big picture like hey we're supposed to be inventing the future we all know what the future looks like like these aren't actual workbench scientists struggling with technical breakthroughs

figuring out like oh now that we've done now that we've solved these three hard problems we can actually do driverless cars or now that we've solved these six hard problems we could actually colonize mars like instead it's just kind of like the public relations logic of what is the thing that will get everybody sort of clapping and smiling along with me. It's probably the shared memory of the trajectory that we thought we were supposed to be on. So like science fiction, particularly like really old science fiction, I think ends up being important there because it's formative for all of these people who are now insanely wealthy and who are treated as though they're geniuses but they're actually not that smart like they're not much smarter than the rest of us so like what's the like shared cultural ideas that they can all grapple with like it's the stuff they read as kids yeah Yeah, I think it's really fascinating, right? Because I feel like you see

this repeat again and again, right? Where they're drawing from these science fictional ideas, they're trying to bring them into being, but then it never really seems to work out as they imagine it will, as they imagine the realization of these science fictional imaginaries being, right? They're really desperate to try to arrive at the metaverse, to try to arrive at space colonization, to try to do any other number of things that they've read about in these books. But then it doesn't work out. And meanwhile, while they are pursuing these things, the rest of the world is like turning to shit because all of our attention and focus is on realizing these like

narrow-minded ideas of what the future should look like pulled from some 50 year old science fiction book instead of actually dealing with like the real problems that we have right and of course most of the science fiction books are also dystopias right like snow crash although apparently neil stevenson insists that he's not sure if it's a dystopia, which like, okay, dude, like, like Snow Crash is dystopia. Ready Player One, it's a dystopia, though. Also, I'm just gonna like, I don't think this is gonna upset any of your listeners, but I'm gonna go ahead and like, take the stance that Ready Player One is actually like, terribly written.

Like, it's not a good book, I don't think. I thought Ready Player One was trash, but it was like, trash that was exciting enough for Mark Zuckerberg that apparently he made everybody who worked in their hardware division buy and read a copy. I don't think it's a well-drawn dystopia. I don't think it's an interesting one. But it's a dystopia where everybody's living in a tiny hovel, and the reason they're getting into the metaverse is because everything sucks outside, except for the plutocrats who have all the wealth. But the other thing that stands out there is, well, that dystopia is actually kind of great if you're the plutocrats who have all the wealth but like the other thing that stands out there is like well that's that dystopia is actually kind of great if you're the plutocrat right so they're looking at that and saying like that would be a wonderful universe to reign yeah while you're the plutocrat

and also like the plutocrat who has a lot of uh issues with connecting with people socially and so you'd prefer to do that by going into a virtual world and doing it that way, which is another kind of line that I feel is drawn between what is presented in Ready Player One. Now, I've only watched the movie, maybe it's different in the book. And Mark Zuckerberg, who is like, you know, seems like an incredibly kind of awkward dude. And meanwhile, keeps making himself the face of this project that like people just are not buying at all yeah though the other thing that stands out to me is like i think about this a lot with the mars colonization idea i'm pretty sure that elon musk genuinely wants to colonize

mars so that he can extend the light of consciousness throughout the universe i think there is zero chance that he wants to be one of the colonizers and like the thing to keep in mind when you think about mars colon like if you try to imagine day to day life on mars that would suck how fucking boring would that be in the same way that like there are people who live in antarctica they are research scientists who are there just to do their research science and then they're going to come home. Because life in Antarctica sucks. It is cold. There is nothing to do but your work.

It is drudgery. Mars would be that, but more dangerous. And my God, I get headaches because I'm in my 40s. What happens if you run out of Advil on Mars? They have this grand vision, but it is a vision of something that other people will do. I'm sure that Zuckerberg would like to be able to play in the metaverse, but Zuckerberg also wants to go on his hydrofoil. You're a centi-billionaire. Everything is interesting for him, and then he can also do some metaverse-y stuff where

he feels like he's inventing the next future. But he's really trying to build a metaverse that everyone else will exist in and continue to make him, what, I guess a trillionaire? If he's a centibillionaire now, he wants to be a trillionaire. But he wants to own the future. It's not so much building it for himself as for everyone else. Because the thing that he's building is drudgery. Meetings in the metaverse are probably better than meetings on Zoom if we imagine a future like 40 years from now i can buy that there's a version of the climate future in which like we're just not flying anymore and if this stuff gets good enough yeah we might want to use that for convenings i

can totally buy that but in terms of like what would i use an oculus headset in my day-to-day life for in the next five to 10 years? Very little. I tried out Beat Saber and it was fun twice. And then I was kind of bored with it, same as Guitar Hero. Guitar Hero was fun 15 years ago and then that got kind of boring too. I don't want to yuck anyone's yum. Some people are really into that. And again, there are people who are loving VRChat and it can be really valuable, particularly for people with disabilities who physically can't move around in space in the same way that I can. So like this can be good for specific publics, but in terms of a grand future for all of society, like Zuckerberg's not building it for himself because the dude gets to go bow hunting and has

like an army of servants at this point. They're building it for everyone else. They're like imagining this is the place that it'll put people so that I am the plutocrat in that story. I think you've nailed it, right? Like, I really think that that sounds like what they're actually building. Of course, you know, the example from Ready Player One is one that I always come back to, right? Like, you imagine this kind of oasis, as it's called there, you know, the story's version of the metaverse. But then if you imagine the like real world that exists outside of that metaverse, it's

like completely terrible. People living in like these kind of trailer park high rises. But you know, the world is shit. And then when we look at the world that we are dealing with, it's increasingly shit. And then when we look at the world that we are dealing with, it's increasingly shit. We're not dealing with the actual real problems that people face in their lives, right? Like it's increasingly like impossible for people to put a roof over their heads. Cost of living is going through the roof for everybody. Meanwhile, the response of the government is to raise interest rates and fight wage inflation so that people can't afford these things.

And meanwhile, the richest people in the world are going off and trying to send rockets to Mars and build vast virtual communities where they want us to buy digital goods and, you know, just stay home all the time and get everything delivered to our homes from Amazon or Uber or what have you. Right. or Uber or what have you, right? Like it's this incredibly dystopian future, but it's one that works for them and their business models and what they ultimately want to achieve. It's terrible. One thing that raises for me, have you read Doug Rushkoff's new book, Survival of the Richest? I'm almost done it. Yes.

Yeah. So like that, that's the other piece that that raises for me is it's not just that they're creating these virtual worlds for the rest of us to inhabit they're also buying land in new zealand and paying a bunch of money for like bunkers in upstate new york with the sense in mind that like rather than them helping to prevent the world from going to shit they just want to make sure that if and when it does, they'll be safe. The sci-fi that's had the biggest impact on me, which just came out as a show, which I hope everyone watches because I'd like a second season. Here I am, I guess, supporting Amazon now. But Peripheral by William Gibson. I think the book that has had the biggest impact on my thinking

about the future. This book came out about 10 years ago. Again, it just came out as an Amazon series. I've watched the first episode and it's great. But the book remapped my thinking about the world. Because he's got this idea in his book called The Jackpot. The book happens in two different time periods. One is the near future and the other is a far future. And that far future is filled with the sparkling gadgetry that Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk imagines our future ought to have. They've got incredible AR. They've got nanobots. They've got all this stuff.

It's also an empty world where everyone is kind of depressed or sort of filled with some sort of PTSD. They make references throughout the book to the jackpot. And it's about maybe halfway through the book that you find out that the jackpot is a series of crises sort of stacked on top of each other, like climate and disease and war and everything else, that over like a 20 or 30 year period, wipes out 80% of the world's population.

And so he's got this time period in the near future where we can see the dystopia that looks very similar to what we live in now, right? Like just like a few companies run everything. There are a few rich people who pay no taxes and everyone else is struggling to get by and is like finding like gray zone ways to like make a little bit of money selling drugs or something because the actual normal economy doesn't work for normal people anymore so he's got that time period and then you sort of jump past the jackpot where most of the world dies and those who are left say that they like they figure that they won the jackpot as one of the survivors but also in that emptier world, we finally have this abundance that Silicon Valley has always promised.

Because for the few people who are left, like, hey, look, we have all this technology. There's nobody else around. So there's abundant everything. book, is I often get the sense looking at Zuckerberg, looking at Musk, looking at Andreasen Thiel, all of these incredibly rich people who are hailed as tech geniuses, rather than trying to prevent the jackpot, they're trying to win it. Because looking at that, and this is what comes up in Rushkoff's book, they're looking at these coming sort of apocalyptically bad issues. And rather than saying, how can we build technologies that help to prevent them or mitigate them,

they're saying like, okay, those are happening, but this is going to be somebody else's problem. I wrote an essay on Substack about this recently where I used Douglas Adams' old idea of a somebody else's problem field. It's from the third book and hit the Hitchhiker series. But it's like, okay, the climate apocalypse is somebody else's problem. And they're kind of operating under the assumption that like, sure, if 80% of the world dies, I'm rich. It's not going to be me. It's not going to be my friends. It's just all those people out there. And they're kind of non-player characters to the billionaire class anyway like they don't actually interact with us in our daily lives musk insists insists that like we're living in a simulation and like hey if i had elon musk's life i would probably

think it was a simulation too it's a really nice life to have but like it'd be like a pretty dumb simulation to just have like a normal life and it's like you know like why am i simulating working in an amazon warehouse like not a fun game i think they're treating it as though the jackpot is a thing that they win and won't really face the consequences. And then their planning is on how do we make sure that when shit goes wrong, I'm never affected by it. Instead of taking any of the responsibility as the world's most powerful and least regulated actors and saying, okay, 80% of the world dying would

be bad. Let's try to make that not happen. I find that absolutely fascinating because one element of this, of course, is how that future that you're talking about is one that's quite distinct from Elon Musk saying, you know, we need to increase the birthright. We need to have more people, you know, Jeff Bezos saying we need to have a trillion people in space and, you know, have these expansions, you know, the kind of long termist view that we need to try to maximize the future population. But then on the other hand, this desire to win the jackpot, so to speak. But then like, and this comes up in Rushkos book as well, where is the labor then that's actually providing this abundance and this service for the people, right? Like, I feel like that's an aspect of Silicon Valley, these companies, these billionaires that often gets forgotten that they kind of like to pretend doesn't exist because they

can say, look, the technology is doing all these other things and the technology hides the workers that exist behind it. And so it's easy for them then to feel that these technologies are providing these wonderful lives for them because the technologies exist to kind of hide all of the workers who allow them to live as these wildly wealthy billionaires. Right. Along with the metaverse being a giant flaming money pit, another one of the giant flaming money pits that often comes up from this crowd is automation of work right like the myth the idea that any day now we'll just have robots that can handle all of

this and so we don't need to think about the workers because like they're kind of npcs now and they won't even exist in the future like i'll just have robots for it and they better not fight back because we'll just accelerate the the rollout the robots. And if they try to demand better wages or anything, right. Which is like, this is a great model. If we sort of like, we wanted to explain what they spend their time paying attention to and investing in, they're spending money on let's invent robots that can do everything. And then they're throwing money at like what the oxford future institute the long-termism crowd saying and let's also give money to technologists and philosophers who will try to figure out how to make sure that the robots don't overthrow us like that's what they're investing in is like we've got like a sci-fi future where there's no people who can overthrow us because it's just

robots and then like nick bostrom please help us figure out how the robots won't overthrow us anyway that's what they're putting their money into. It's like all dumb and bad, but like not that complicated. Yeah, it's not blowing my mind. Like these are things that I recognize, but like it just it just sucks and it's just terrible, right? Like we got one of those cork boards and we're like putting the string between them. And it's like, this is all terror. This is all connected and dumb and terrible. But like, oh, look, this goes like long-termism ties to this.

It's also bad. Like, exactly. But like, not a smart conspiracy, just a dumb conspiracy. Yeah. I wonder what you make of the response to the metaverse then, right? Because you're talking about this future, how these billionaires are envisioning the future, how they're trying to prepare so that they are best positioned to survive whatever comes, right? Then on the other hand, I feel like when you look at the response

to the metaverse that Zuckerberg is putting out there, but then many of these other companies as well, it's like there's kind of some interest there by investors, right? They see the potential to make some money. I feel like the media has been mixed. I feel like to some degree, there's been some reporting on it that's been pretty excited by some of the tech press. But then I feel like the further we move away from last year's announcement of the metaverse, the more critical that becomes when it just looks more and more like shit. public from what I can see, and maybe I'm in my little filter bubble here, is that people do not like this. People do not see this as attractive. As you say, there might be some people who are using VRChat and enjoy that. And it's a relatively niche group in the way that you were talking about Second Life before. There are people who use this, who enjoy this, and that's perfectly all well and good. But it's not something that you can build a global kind of business on like a or a Meta. So what do you make of that response? And I guess the public response in particular, where people do not really seem to be interested in going this way.

I enjoy a bit of schadenfreude now and again. And so I think the public response has been delicious. Because the arc of the reporting has been, he makes this announcement and I think some reporters right away were like, okay, I don't know about this man. But a lot of them, like, I think, I think it's Casey Newton who in general, I like a lot of his stuff, but he was upfront kind of saying, look, I have to assume that if these smart, extremely rich and successful people throw $10, $15 billion at the problem, they're probably going to come up with something. And when Zuckerberg made this announcement, my piece, Making Fun of VR, had just come out. And I definitely was kind of like, this is the best possible test case for whether or not it has a demand side problem that it's

not going to fix. Because a lot of people bought an Oculus. Hell, I eventually bought an Oculus. I was like, sure, I'll try this thing. It was when they were about to raise the price by $100. And I was like, I'm going to buy this before it goes up for $100. Maybe I'm wrong. At a minimum, I should try it enough to find out if I'm being an idiot slash being a 43-year-old who's no longer getting where things are going And again, like I think I've used it four times and like it was just boring. After a year of this, those same reporters are saying, well, they're throwing so much money at it. Like it's still early.

It could be. Again, like I think 40 or 50 years from now, I imagine we're going to have some kind of different devices than just like an upgrade on the iPhone. Will those devices have some kind of heads-up display like a good 40 years like probably if for no other reason than like everybody with money is treating this as the next thing and if they try for a couple generations something might stick eventually we just can't see now i'm definitely someone who in 1978 would have looked at mainframe computers and looked at the personal computer industry and

been like, that's for hobbyists, who the fuck cares? Like, I absolutely would have looked at the Apple II and the Mac and been like, who the fuck cares? And actually, I think that for those early years, yeah, it's a hobbyist device that's only for people who can code. But then a few of them were imagining once this gets cheap enough and people build things on top, eventually some stuff will change. And it took a long time. Eventually it did. So does that happen in 40, 50 years?

Sure, maybe. But in the meantime, some of the largest companies in the world that are barely suppressed monopolies that I think do harm and also I just in general don't like are going to burn themselves to the ground trying to force everyone to use a product that nobody wants to use that is fucking funny like everybody making fun of meta when they come out with legs in their announcement and then meta like a day later having to be like by the way those were those are simulated legs we haven't actually figured out legs but we swear we will like we're living in 2022 as a political scientist of american politics like the likelihood of us

living in basically an autocracy within the next three years is at least 20 maybe higher than 40 like these are dark times if we can't take joy in watching meta fucking face plant with a product that everyone is trying and saying like, oh no, this man, this sucks. And then their answer is like, okay, well here's a better version that costs $1,500. Why don't you spend $1,500 on a thing that sucks? Did we mention that there are meetings with Microsoft? Like that is good comedy in a time when it is hard to find good comedy. God bless you, Mark Zuckerberg. You're burning your shitty empire to the ground. I love Twitter, and I'm going to miss Twitter when Elon Musk destroys it. But watching Elon

Musk set $44 billion on fire because he's such a dumb dummy. That's going to be fun. I'm going to have some fun as that shit goes down because the platform is going to, when they have no staff anymore, it's just going to turn to shit and he's going to be left with a thing that's useless, just like MySpace was. It's going to be amazing. No, I think it's absolutely beautiful to see them burning all of this cash, amounts of money that we can hardly even imagine. Right. Because they're just such large sums. And, you know, one of the things I always say about about Musk and Twitter, right, is there's a lot of discussion, I think, on the platform right now, as it looks like Elon is finally going to take over, that people are going to abandon ship as soon as he leaves. And my response to that is always like, this is the kind of drama that like Twitter lives for, right? To actually see all of this shit going down, to be around it, to see it happening firsthand, to see whether it's Trump tweeting or Musk tweeting or whoever, like to experience this, to engage in the discourse about it.

This is what Twitter lives for. And even if Musk takes over and then starts to just drive it into the ground, that's exactly what like the core Twitter user base is on that platform for, right? To see the drama, to see everything explode. That's what they want. Right. So my prediction isn't that everyone's gonna boycott and leave twitter right away i don't think they are what's gonna happen is it i think it's gonna become myspace or like tumblr right like there are a lot of social media that if we look back particularly more than 10 years ago because 10 years ago is when the current platform empires all rose.

But again, from the Wired project, there was an era where Yahoo was the future. Yahoo. There was the AOL era. These empires rise and fall, and often what precedes the fall is a billionaire buying it and deciding that they know how to monetize. Like Rupert Murdoch burned so much money purchasing MySpace so that he could be cool. And I think what's going to happen is like Musk's going to buy it. Everyone's going to like complain, but then stick around for the like the Twitter drama. You're right about that. But then over the course of six months, as all of the staff get fired, like everybody

who works at Twitter get fired, he tries a bunch of things to monetize it because he's going to be paying over a billion dollars in interest every year on the thing. So he's going to try a bunch of monetization plays that suck. And the experience is going to get – like it's going to keep getting shittier and shittier. The experience that I have right now as a cis white dude, I think six months from now is going to be closer to the experience of any of my black female colleagues. And when like that type of harassment is happening to the cis white dudes and much worse is happening to everyone else, that's when people are going to go somewhere else. And like, it would be cool if it was Mastodon. I'm not sure that it's actually going to go somewhere else. And like, it would be cool if it was Mastodon. I'm not sure that it's actually going to be Mastodon or anything that is designed to be better, but there will be a next thing because like the attempts to make Twitter profitable,

I wrote a post on Substack a while back. It was main thesis is that big money ruins everything. Like I don't necessarily think that you can't have a good internet plus capitalism, but I'm very convinced that you can't have a good internet plus this type of capitalism. A capitalism in which everything is aimed not just at making money, but at making exceptionally large money. The incentives, once money gets exceptionally large, all get skewy and screwed and bad. And like a thing that has made Twitter, I think relatively good is that it's been pretty bad at making money and pretty good at like just doing the thing that people want it to do. Like there's a bunch of things that it could do better, but like the

core thing that it does, it's pretty much fine at. I wrote a different post a while ago about like what Facebook is like, there's a thing that Facebook is really good for, which is just being a self-updating Rolodex of the people that you've known throughout your life. If Facebook went back to just being the place where I could see pictures of people who I knew 15 years ago and how are they doing with their kids, Facebook would be lovely and I'd probably visit it three times a day and it would make way less money. There's actually, I think, probably a profitable version of Facebook that does what Facebook does well. But in the attempt to make big money, they end up ruining that.

Twitter has basically been fine for a decade because it was bad at making money and it could just be good at what it's good at. He's definitely going to ruin that because he's got to make a billion dollars just to pay the interest payments every year. If you fire all the staff you let all the white nationalists back on and encourage the harassment and you try a bunch of weird shit to monetize a year from now we definitely will have left twitter not because the like drama has gotten bad but just because everything else has turned shitty and we can find that we'll build something else for the drama i think you're completely right you know that's what i see as well is

because of the changes that mus wants to make, because he's so ill informed about what makes a workable social media platform. And because, you know, in a way that Twitter has been like somewhat protected from the investor pressure, I think it's really going to come back in force as Musk takes over. And especially if he tries to go the full way and create his X, know platform which which he talks about which i think is just bullshit he has no ideas there but also we would not do that like no yeah we're not all gonna like i understand that you like saw a social app from china and thought it was exciting elon but like you're not that good at this and nobody wants that like we're not gonna

live our social lives on elon musk app. It's you say, I also think that that is kind of a fantasy, right? Because of the economy, because of the structures that we live in right now, whatever is going to follow on from Twitter is something that is going to be trying to make more money from our interaction on a platform. You know, I despair if like TikTok or something like that is what replaces Twitter because I like the text. I'm not a big fan of full video and going that direction, even images like Instagram. You know, I think that there's a real important place for a text platform for that form of communication. But I also think, as we saw with the Web3 shit, whatever these companies are going to try to push that's going to come next is going to be even more

commercialized, even more monetized, and that's going to be even shittier, even if at the beginning, it might look a little bit better because there won't be, as with many of these platforms and these services, there's less of that incentive to commercialize right at the beginning because you're trying to attract all of the users,

you're trying to grow rapidly, all these sorts of things. And then that comes in later, right? And I also think it's something that we see with the metaverse, right? Because Mark Zuckerberg promotes this as being open, and he's going to, you know, work with all of these different companies, and it's going to be like really welcoming toward creators. But when you actually look at what he's making, he's just trying to create a new platform, right? He's trying to escape the kind of control of Apple's

App Store and Google's Play Store to a lesser degree and have meta control the platform for whatever this kind of future virtual world is going to be where we sell and buy all these virtual goods. And there's all these new ways to advertise to us in the digital realm, right? This is really what the ultimate goal is here. And as tech always does does it just gets framed in a way that's like welcoming toward people and supposedly going to solve all of our problems and be amazing and beautiful and all these things that we expect that are typically associated with the tech kind of marketing practices but never really come into being right and the thing that stands

out to me like matthew ball is the vc who's really pushed the ideas of the metaverse. I think he's wrong, but I think he's smart. And the thing that I think he's smart but wrong about in particular is he sort of lays out a roadmap for how to build the metaverse that very much treats the moment we're in now as being similar to sort of the pre-web internet where they're building protocols they're figuring out how to make stuff work they're figuring out what like now it's like figuring out things like payment rails and he recognizes like if this is going to work then apple can't control it facebook can't control it like he's noting all that but the thing that i think he's sort of way too rosy optimistic about is like this isn't like the pre-web internet because there's too much money in it like the pre-web internet had a bunch of computing engineers putting out like requests for proposals and figuring out like what should we do and they come up with like tcp ip like the protocols they're inventing like that's back when the money at stake was in the single-digit millions, maybe the double-digit million.

The scale was so small that the stakes were low, which meant that they could all have friendly intellectual conversations when they figure out what can work for everyone because the stakes are low. Even if Meta and Apple and Nvidia, even if all of the different players agree that they need to treat this the way they did in the 80s. Even if Ball convinces them, everybody act like that. It's going to be play acting because the stakes are so high because big money ruins everything. And that's going to trash it. Now, the thing I do want to point out, because we're both – I usually go full dystopian.

And here, we're being go full dystopian and here like we're like i think being double full dystopian so the thing i want to pull back and note like eventually there will be agency but there isn't right now so let me start by saying while i find it beautiful and entertaining to watch meta light their money on fire the thing that i would find way more beautiful is a motherfucking wealth tax. Throughout the history of the internet as covered in wire, the thing that they never talk about is wealth inequality. The simplest answer is, if you don't tax the billionaires, you end up with more wealth inequality, duh. There is a future, a potential future, where big money doesn't ruin everything because we actually start to tax billionaires and tax these products and reduce wealth inequality. That's not impossible to do. It just requires a political will that our governments in the US and around the world do not have right now.

We currently have an economic elite that controls a ton of stuff, and they don't want to be taxed. And like their answer when they get criticized is like, all right, well, then we're going to like bash the media and support authoritarians. And they're really good at convincing a lot of people that they shouldn't be taxed and that they should be left to do whatever they want. And one of my arguments is that long termism is just kind of another means and effective altruism more broadly of kind of, you know, offering, offering a way for people to feel that billionaires are justified in having the power and wealth that they have. Right. Because, you know, we shouldn't take it from them. They should just invest it in effective organizations and nonprofits and charities to

make the world a better place. Right. Yeah. It right yeah it is a fantasy in which they are the well-deserving elites because they have it all figured out and we should trust them and the reality is like we live in a world without Wizards like they like I'm not saying they're not smart in their own realms but they haven't figured out the entire world the entire universe we shouldn't be trusting them as the Wizards who can like control and guide the future and also, if we do that, they're going to make stupid mistakes. Because if you actually look at these fuckers, they make a lot of stupid mistakes. They're not actually brighter than the rest of us across all fields. And it's mostly, particularly with people like Elon, a huge PR play.

Zuckerberg, to his credit, mostly does his one thing, which is building a monopoly social network empire and then owning the advertising rails and payment rails so they can make a ton of money off of it but like you know it sets up the chan zuckerberg initiative and they like spend money funding public schools in ways that i like probably don't think are the best way to do it but it's still like all right you're trying to charitable giving you're trying to do it well you're like throwing a bunch of money at some things but like at the very least zuckerberg isn't like and also i'm a space warrior at least not yet like he yeah like he has mostly to his credit like stayed within his fucking lane he's now trying to create another lane which is the metaverse and like it's

not working but like the ones who've decided that they are like omniscient geniuses, like they have figured out every single area. And we're seeing this with like all of the Elon bros now, like David Sachs, who are like, yeah, you know, I've hung out at Y Combinator, so I can probably figure out Russia, Ukraine. Like I'm a political scientist and like my part of my graduate work was international relations. So I've taken just enough international relations work courses to know that I have no fucking answer to Russia and Ukraine. Why would I I've learned just enough to know that I don't fucking know shit. But like this crowd that has decided like, well, given that I invested early in the right company by being friends with Peter Thiel, like I probably know how to manage all global conflicts. Like, no, you fucking don't. I think it's really fascinating. And it picks up on something.

I can't remember if it was in your article or a sub stack piece. But you basically said, like, you know, going back to what we were saying about the science fiction, you know, these, these billionaires are incredibly powerful, right? A lot of what they're trying to push onto the world is inspired by these science fictional stories that they read as teenagers or young adults or what have you. And then they try to bring that into being, whether it's the space colonization, whether it's the metaverse and whatever other bullshit they're up to. But one of the questions that you pose is like, what if the stories that they have been raised on were not like dystopian science fiction technology stories,

but stories where like, we were trying to achieve more equal worlds, we were implementing wealth taxes, we were, you know, trying to redistribute the wealth and shit like that, like, would that have influenced them in a different way? Yeah, like, if imagine if the stories that Elon was raised on were about the glories of Hyperloop trains. Then maybe instead of trying to pitch Hyperloop in order to sabotage transit, like maybe instead of like the boring company, he would have been like, I'm finally going to really build a Hyperloop. Like that's the dream.

And all his friends would have been like, oh my God, there could be a Hyperloop. That would be amazing. Like that's what we need is like Neil Stevenson to write a Hyperloop book. Or a high-speed rail book. Like, you know, give us that. Like, I love trains. You'll see if it's a bigger thing. Yeah, that's not as unimaginable enough, though, you know, like, it's too realizable. It has to be crazy and out there and linked to some shitty cyberpunk future, I guess.

I mean, again, i don't have these skills that neil stevenson has in terms of crafting these stories but like that dude wrote like a two book series like starting with basically world of warcraft and then getting into like do we all live in a simulation like if he can do that i'm sure he can write a high speed rail nine book series. Like, come on, Neil, get to work, man. Zuckerberg is putting out there that this is going to be like the virtual space where we all kind of commune and come together and it's slowly going to move out into mixed reality and alternative reality and like our whole reality is going to be taken over by these technologies that we interact with whether it's through VR headsets or you know augmented reality glasses or what have you right so in one of your pieces you wrote at, at some point, we have to consider the possibility that the problem with VR is that people don't actually want it, right? And I think

that a lot of the response to the metaverse stuff is really showing us this, right? That people are really skeptical of this notion, this idea that we should spend a whole chunk of our day with these headsets on our faces, or even in the future, you know, having glasses that have kind of digital displays, constantly popping things up in front of our faces. And then on top of that, we have Zuckerberg and Nadella and all these sorts of people selling us this vision of, you know, the metaverse as something that is for enterprise, where there's these expensive headsets, and we're going to be doing all these meetings and work applications in the metaverse or in a virtual reality space. So what do you think that this metaverse future that they're trying to sell us actually ends up looking like?

Are we actually going to arrive at the point that Zuckerberg wants us to get to where it's this kind of big consumer space where we're making all these digital purchases and there's this big new digital goods economy? Or is it something much more limited as you've observed with kind of past iterations of virtual reality? So I'm not sure. I think it is unlikely that we get his version of the metaverse in the next, certainly the next five years. I think they're going to make a bunch of advances in hardware. You know,

they're spending enough money that they will, there's a bunch of workbench engineers and scientists who are very well funded right now. And they're not going to put all their thumbs. I think that's going to result in some actual technical advances without having nearly the payoff that he needs for his company. So I think like that's going to be an entertaining clusterfuck for a few years. And then, and here's where I'm going to sort of

go back to my roots as a dystopian, what I think comes after that, if we imagine 10, 15 years into the future, I think we need to take the climate crisis seriously in our imagining. One of the biggest critiques that I have of the metaverse and of Web3 and of AI, I think DALI too, it seems fun to play with. But I joked on Twitter last year that the world scientific community has said, we need a whole of society response to the climate crisis now. And the response was like, well, we decided to set a patch of rainforest on fire so we can teach machine learning how to produce pictures for us. Does that help?

These are solutions that treat the climate crisis as somebody else's problem. And I think over the next 10 to 15 years, since I expect it's not going to be a smooth path, I expect we're going to see rising authoritarianism in the US and elsewhere, which makes technocratic science more difficult. I think 10 to 15 years from now, what we're going to see is more and more presence of the climate crisis in what we're building and what we're needing. So my hope is that the technical breakthroughs that they make through this bonanza of spending on a future that's not going to come to pass then ends up being useful as we start to have technologists who take seriously the idea that they should be building tools that help for resilience.

If we were doing a scenario planning around, let's imagine that air travel just becomes far more rare, like exceptionally rare, because we can't afford it anymore, because we actually are taxing fossil fuels in that future. So, like, how does society respond to that? we don't worry about scientific meetings and international companies coming together. Or if it's not full collapse, then you need to build in the resilience of, well, okay, let's have more physical co-presence on top of our digital interactions. That's a space for VR or AR that could fit into a climate future once we are treating the climate crisis as something that is impending and we need to build resilience and adaptation into as we also lower our emissions. So it's not a smooth path to there. And I think along the way, a lot of the big giant companies that have defined tech and made it less

good and less delightful and less useful and less fun while getting rich, I think a bunch of them are going to crater and I'm going to find that hilarious. I'm going to make fun of it on whatever comes after Twitter. But then as times get harder, because we didn't respond to the climate crisis 15 years ago like we should have or 30 years ago like we should have. As times get harder, then I think we're going to see these sorts of tools

fitting into the responses that we finally start to take seriously. I don't know what those will be because I can't really look that far ahead. I don't know what that world looks like. I mostly want to prevent the worst of it. I want to prevent the jackpot. But I think as things get hard and we set the silly shit aside, we probably realize that there's a bunch of ways that the advances that they made when they threw 15 billion at hardware in like that old shell of a company meta end up leading to something kind of cool. That's really interesting. And, you know, I think it's definitely possible, right?

One of the things I do wonder about with that kind of future, maybe it's not completely related to what you're saying, right? But when you think about the prospect of a metaverse, for example, and you think about it through the lens of climate, right? When you think about it through the lens of sustainability, resilience, you know, what is the impact of building that out, of having these massive virtual worlds that are always on, that are effectively like a game that is always being played? And then it's in the cloud, it's being run in these data centers that use a ton of energy and resources themselves where you have not only the need for people to replace their headsets every so often so there's

the e-waste that comes with that but then also you're cycling through the servers that keep this this virtual world running like that also has a climate impact. All of these things that we do online have a climate impact. And I feel like that is something that is also really easy. When we were talking earlier about it being easy to forget the workers who are behind the technologies and the automations, when we think about all this AI and all these, you know, tools that are supposedly going to be really helpful for us, even though it's often very unclear how they're going to be helpful for us, they all have a pretty significant impact as well. Right. Well, they do. This is a tangent, but I think it's a good one. It calls to mind for me that it both has the direct climate impact of the internet, our digital world, is run on physical

processors that are run on fossil fuels. And Of course, 20 years from now, those processors could be run on solar. They could be run on renewables if there's a huge green vortex clean energy transition. That could happen. The other thing that points out to me, and there's an upside and a funny downside. Back in 2016, it was late 2016, just after Trump got elected, I wrote this very dark medium piece about, here's how I think it's going to go down as American democracy falls. I reread that just after Biden won. I listed, I think, maybe 10 or 14 things, and I got two of them wrong. I thought that the economy would collapse right away. It didn't, because the markets were like, yeah, fuck it, Trump's an idiot, but we don't care.

The stock market kept going up because they were like, oh, you won't regulate us? Cool. Let's do crime. Yeah, I thought that there would be, during Trump's years, I thought there would probably be a nuclear war. We came way closer than we should have with North Korea and others, but no bombs were fired. And the other thing that I thought was vr was about to get crazy good because i had read my wired magazine i was like i haven't tried the oculus

but like apparently like it's it's for real now and i thought that was going to lead to sort of a brave new world type scenario where as the world gets dark and depressing out there people were just going to like cut themselves off from it One of the things that would dampen street protest was people would be like, entertainment's crazy good. I'm just going to wear my VR headset all the time. This is in Brave New World. It's also in not Parable of the Sower, but the second book, the follow-up to Parable of the Sower that Octavia Butler wrote. That's one of the things that she builds into that world is rich people who are just like living off in their separate universes and ignoring what's happening around them.

So like that's both like there's a sci-fi pedigree there. But like I was imagining in 2017, 2016, as VR gets crazy good, that is actually going to lead people to just tune out the world around them. And that's going to be a problem. And so sort of like the dystopian upside here is like i'm i'm way less worried about that now like i think we're headed for authoritarianism i don't think it's an authoritarianism that people will just tune out because vr is so good because we've had like throughout the pandemic like they threw everything at vr games and people were like yeah this is like i can go to vr chat and like talk with people but like

like all the vr role-playing games kind of suck. People are just playing consoles instead. So this breakthrough of VR being so good that we all tune out just hasn't happened because VR is fucking boring. dealing with like as we are trying to build social movements that respond to the authoritarianism and that respond to the sheer amount of like e-waste and fuel burn that is going into all these architectures the one sort of like minor thing that we have going for us is at least people won't be quite as distracted by brilliant gaming on vr as i were they would because vr is fucking boring yeah they'll be distracted by tiktok instead like i understand the appeal of tiktok i think it's because i'm

in my 40s and have small kids so like i like there's very little time that i could spend on tiktok because i can read twitter while they're like watching daniel tiger like i can't put my headset in and be like like you kids have fun i'm gonna like watch videos on my phone so like the appeal of tiktok is like very is much smaller for people in my setting so like yeah i guess that's the addictive thing but like you said before like i totally agree tiktok is not going to replace twitter because there's a bunch of use cases where you can read stuff quickly on your phone and like get those dopamine hits from like getting retweets. And like those use cases are actually separate from the ones where you're gonna watch video with sound on.

So like TikTok's gonna keep getting bigger. Apparently it's like very addictive, but like its niche is smaller than like all encompassing one that like we used to fear. And that is the ambition of Zuckerberg and others. And you know, that's a whole other topic of discussion that we could get into there. Dave, I think this has been a fascinating, a sobering, maybe in some cases a depressing

conversation, but a really entertaining one and one that I'm really happy that we had. So I thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. This was exactly the blast that I imagined it would be if I got to be on the show. Thanks so much. This is great. Dave Karp is an associate professor at George Washington University and the author of The Thanks so much. This was great. is produced by Eric Wickham and is part of the Harbinger Media Network. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us

and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.