Tech Won't Save Us - Time for a Butlerian Jihad?: A ‘Dune’ Chat w/ Ed Ongweso Jr & Brian Merchant

Episode Date: March 18, 2024

In a bonus episode, Paris Marx is joined by Ed Ongweso Jr. and Brian Merchant to share their thoughts on Dune: Part Two, how it relates to the modern tech industry, and whether today’s Luddites can take anything from Dune’s Butlerian Jihad.Ed Ongweso Jr is finance editor at Logic(s) Magazine and cohost of This Machine Kills. Brian Merchant is a technology journalist and the author of Blood In the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech.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. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.Also mentioned in this episode:You can watch the entire livestream over on YouTube.For Disconnect, Paris wrote about how the digital revolution has failed.Support the show

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free, but that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks. And you might be thinking, hey, this isn't a usual episode. This isn't dropping on Thursday. And you would be exactly right if you thought that. On Friday, March 8th, I did a live stream with Ed Ongwezo Jr. and Brian Merchant, people who you will be very familiar with from the podcast where we discussed the new Dune part

two film. And of course, you know, the first one made by Denis Villeneuve and also connected the story of Dune to, you know, the larger resurgence of the Luddites that we've been experiencing over the past few years now, I guess, because in the Dune universe, there is, you know, this kind of foundational event called the Butlerian Jihad, where people destroy the thinking machines or the intelligent machines that are taking over. And that really sets the technological foundation for this world that we see in Denise films and, of course, read about in the books by Frank Herbert. And that occurs 10,000 years before the events of the story of Dune. So this recording might not sound as good as the usual episode because it is just, you know, what we recorded live. And then Eric,

my producer, cleaned it up a little bit. But if you are into the Dune film, you might still find it interesting. So I figured it was worth kind of putting it on the podcast feed here so you can check it out. If you do just want to watch us on YouTube, you can, of course, find the link in the show notes to do that. We spend about the first half of the conversation talking about our thoughts on the film itself, you know, whether we liked it, the aspects of it that we thought wereites and how it relates to the more critical perspectives that people have on technology today. And, you know, what it means to have stories like this reflected in science fiction, even if, of course, you know, the Denis Villeneuve films don't focus so much on the Butlerian jihad or don't really make it something that is ever something that is like constantly being referred to, but you can still feel it in the way that the world is put together. So yeah, just a quick introduction to let you know what this is,

to let you know that the regular episode is still coming on Thursday. But if you're at all interested in, you know, the Dune films and our thoughts on that, feel free to give this a listen and, you know, maybe you'll enjoy it. So enjoy this conversation and I'll see you again on Thursday. Hello, everyone. Welcome to our Dune 2 live stream, Time for a Butlerian Jihad, where we will be talking about, of course, Denis Villeneuve's new film and I'm sure the previous one as well, but also connecting that with things that are happening in our own world. As that quote in the introduction there introduced you to, there is an important event in the world of Dune called

the Butlerian Jihad, where they attack the thinking machines and replace it with something else. So we will get into talking about that more and how that relates to the Luddism that, you know, I think a lot of people who will be familiar with Tech Won't Save Us and with the work of, of course, Adam Bryan, who will be my guest joining me in just a minute, you know, have been working on for a while. So we'll be digging into the film. We'll be giving our thoughts on that. Of course, happy for your comments. You know, we'll kind of bring some of those in as we're talking about it to pick up on that. And then, you know, about probably halfway through our conversation, we will pivot and, you know, not, you know, we won't end talking about the films, I'm sure,

but to kind of bring the films into conversation with these larger tech issues that we're often talking about in our various work on the podcast or, you know, in the writing and, of course, podcasting as well that Ed and Brian do. So very excited for you to be watching this. Of course, this live stream is public for everybody. It will stay up. We've done live streams in the past that were just for Patreon supporters. But this one, we wanted to do for everyone, give that a shot. So hopefully you enjoy it.

Feel free to share it around if you want to do that. Of course, this is a live stream made by Tech Won't Save Us. If you want to support the show, if you're a listener, that's great. If you're not, you can, of course, go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus, where you can support the work that goes into making the show, this live stream, and the other things that we do. If you don't have money to contribute, you can also give us some of your Chome company holdings. We'll take those as well. But with that said, let's bring on some of our guests. Let's get to the discussion, which is what you're here for anyway. So my first guest is Ed Ongwezo Jr. Of course, he's the Mahdi, you know, the Lisa Nalgaib, the voice from another podcast who

will be joining us for this incredible discussion. Ed, welcome to the live show. Thanks for having me. Really excited to, you know, chop it up about Dune and Luddism. Absolutely. The little jihad we want. We love a good jihad have you recovered from your experience of of seeing the film yet is it still kind of washing over you in waves of spice or i mean i've seen it three times and i have a few

more in me i need i want to see it at least one more time in 40x i want to have the chair rock me around when i'm on the world. Maybe one more in IMAX. It's still with me. It's a really beautiful movie. A lot of the images are just still in my head, as we'll talk about. Absolutely, we will. I've also seen it three

times. I'm going again on Sunday, and I'm sure I have at least probably another couple in me after that, which sounds ridiculous. Like I totally get that this is a ridiculous thing to say, but I don't know. We're funding Dune Messiah, you know, we're doing our part. I'm bringing people with me who wouldn't have gone otherwise. Like I'm making this happen, right? You know, I know you are, of course, our Kwisatz Hader rock joining us today but i am indulging in the water of life uh right making sure that i am making sure that i am uh able to process this poison so i can i can kind

of join you on that level i i don't know if that means we'll have to have a sword fight later um but you know i i don't want to i don't want to have to kill you or to be killed at your blade so i'll have to put some poison on mine. Yeah, we'll figure it out. We'll make a new way. Totally. Now, Ed's not our only guest. We have another fantastic guest who if you are a regular listener of Tech Won't Save Us,

you will be very familiar with because I think he's been on the show more times than anyone else. He needs a little more love. He hasn't been on a lot lately. So we figured we had to have him on the podcast here. Now, if Ed is our kind of our Mahdi here, I think Brian is kind of like our Gurney Halleck, you know, he's our advisor, he's our trusted mentor, our great friend. And it's such a joy to have him on the show as well. Brian, welcome.

Thank you. Thank you. Should I get my guitar? i don't have like the weird stringed instrument sing some some uh sing us a little tale yeah i should have prompted you on that made sure you had an instrument to play after you're off your gourd on the water of life we can start playing some perfect well great to have you both here you know earlier today not just recently chris said that uh you know he had his popcorn bucket ready to go you know i did not get one of the the fantastic wonderful popcorn buckets um i heard it was actually pretty hard to get the popcorn out of them um so we don't want those to show you but

we have plenty of discussion to go into in regards to the film. So I'd say, Brian, you saw it more recently. You know, you got out of it just the other night. What are your overall impressions to get us started on Dune Part 2? How are you feeling about it? It's good. I'm glad to see it becoming this, you know, this phenomenon. It like very much really does have its own visual identity and its own uh real sort of like sense of what it's trying to achieve i and i thought it was pretty effective you know i i can't i almost i don't know maybe just i was so excited about the first one and like what the promise of the world and what what what he could do with it was so i got i got so amped up about that and it's like easier i so i kind of maybe like the first one a little bit better, just because I was still plugged into it, still excited about the promise of seeing the Dune universe.

But I don't know. It surprised me in some ways. I think there were some choices made that I'm sure we'll talk about, both that did some interesting things with Herbert's original vision and turning some things on its head that should have been turned on its head and some things that were left like weirdly kind of unexamined um yeah i i almost like wonder what the difference would be if the first movie were to come out today because you know we're we're here to talk about the butlerian jihad which is it's not like villeneuve like you know just missed that and and just to say you know but it's not mentioned by name in either of the films but its presence is certainly there you could like you're I was just re-watching some of the first film this morning and you can really tell like it's like

this very almost it's not anti-technological but it's very different than a lot of other space operas where everything's very kind of like minimalist and smooth and it's not all like the blinking buttons and you know like circuitry that you that dominate a lot of other sci-fi it's this sort of like very different kind of take on like what what an alternate sort of technology without anything resembling ai might be so i think that's interesting and i wonder if again if you had started the project more recently when this was like really much in very much more in the zeitgeist that we would have heard it would have been maybe made more explicit but i i mean i don't know it will there was obviously that sort of like kind of weird sort of not quite uh referencing of the you know the the israel gaza conflict that's been pulled out

when they bomb the Fremen enclave that felt more resonant in a way that the commentary on AI or the lack thereof didn't quite seem as it brought to the fore. But I'm interested to hear what you guys think. I'm excited to discuss this thing. It was a hell of a movie. It does just wash over you,

and you do just kind of submit to it which is uh which is always fun yeah i think i tweeted after i first saw it that it was almost like a religious experience like you know experiencing the world and everything that he was doing and especially you know because religion is such a fundamental part of the story and it's certainly you know a piece of it that is central to the adaptation that Villeneuve did in focusing so much on that element of it. And of course, he's talked a lot about the, you know, particular choices that he made in terms of what he wanted the story to focus on and kind of the pieces of it that he felt were okay to have, you know, go by the wayside to not make it, you know, too too confusing too complex for a wider audience and of course i think i should say you know if it's not clear um spoiler alert uh because we will be digging into all those things um if you know i i imagine with a stream like this after it's been out for a week that you know to expect that if you're a viewer but just in case um ed turn to you now for your kind of you know your bigger thoughts on uh the film before we start digging into the very specifics of it. After you got out of one or two or three viewings of the film, how are you feeling about it? ambush scene scene is one of my favorite sort of openers to a little sci-fi story like this

and the bodies falling to the ground and thumping yes something is it was such a fun hypnotic piece i really like some of the moves to like compress large chunks of what would otherwise have been dialogue heavy info dumps into just like visual cues how do you ride the worm what's the extraction of water like or why did they do it or how they do it to do it or what's the reverence for various types of people um depending on who they are and their water i came away with like oh this is this is actually like one really great if you haven't i think read the books but also if you read the books but maybe me or the first one, it maybe didn't come away with the right takeaway, you know, which is Paul being, of course, there's something bad happening for the universe. But what I wasn't supposed to cheer for. but also I think kind of focusing on more of the world outside of computation,

right? There's, you get a vague sense of like, oh, well, you know, people have abandoned computation in the first movie because of the threat of AI thousands and thousands of years before. And I think like really zoning in on how the Fremen live life was really interesting though. I wish there was much more depiction of their actual lives of their social lives outside of you know some of the rituals that we got to see although those were really interesting but they're like you know like you

talked about from the religious framework um and highlighting the reverence they have for water the reverence they have for one another's water but you know kind of showing that you know ways of living that are not necessarily some sort of primitivist thing just because they don't have computers and are still and and also surprise the the incompetent overseers that they have to the north who don't even know about the existence of the southern half of the fremen population and i think like a nice little testament to like life you know still find there's still being other ways to live without computers even if you know not to romanticize a really a really harsh life in the middle of a desert where water is scarce and you have to preserve it in every shape or form that's

it's in yeah and our vision for a future luddite society is uh intensely feudal yeah right right we're here shilling for for feudal for feudalism and then maybe you retreat to the countryside with your little seat yeah but i think that a lot of visions have no almost no interest in depicting any like life of the in the future except computers or no computers. And if it's no computers, then it's like the worst, most grueling, substance-based lifestyle where there's no joy, it's just misery. And I think I'd like that the Fremen were not just reduced to some sort of tribal, barely able to live off the land depiction as i feel like other adaptations might have done or other sci-fi series do as well yeah now i i feel like my you know as i said i've seen it

three times i for me i feel like don't even know if is like one of those directors whose aesthetic i just absolutely love like i think he makes such beautiful films that I want to go back and see them, like, multiple times in the cinema just to, like, have that experience. Like, when Blade Runner 2049 came out, I saw that in cinema four or five times just because it was such a beautiful film to look at.

And I feel like, you know, Doom Part II kind of builds on the, I don't know, the learnings that he had over the past previous films, not just like in the visual sense, but, you know, to tie that together with how to tell the story in the way he wants to tell it. You know, as you say, Ed, you know, not to always need all this dialogue in order to illustrate what he wants to show. You know, he's done interviews where he said that, you know, he basically doesn't want to, he doesn't like to do dialogue heavy stuff. He thinks film should be able to really survive kind of with the visual medium, but then also to bring in the sound in, you know, the sound

effects, as you're saying, with like the thumping of, you know, kind of the bodies falling off the cliff of the Harkonnens early in the film, but then also having this great kind of score and soundtrack, you know, that Hans Zimmer and his team put together. But then on top of that, also knowing when not to use sound, like when the final battle at the end of the film between Paul and Feyd-Rautha is just like silent

and you just hear like, you know, the blades and all that sort of stuff. Like I think, you know, from a kind of technical level, like I think he just puts it together in such like a beautiful package. But then the story itself, I felt that, you know,

the changes that he made, I thought kind of made sense for the type of film that he was trying to make. You know, I think it's interesting that he said that he felt that there were, when you go into adapting dune

you can look at the benny jesserit you can look at the spacers guild you can look at the mentats as like these different you know parts of the galaxy or parts of this kind of political system that's emerged that you can focus on and he made a specific choice to focus on the benny jesserit and not to look so much at the spacersers Guild or at the Mentats because he felt that it would kind of overcomplicate the story that he was trying to tell in the time he had to tell it. I also felt generally that the cast and the acting was quite stellar. I was not sure if someone like Zendaya or Timothee Chalamet would be able to kind of get to the level that they needed to get at. But for me, I felt largely that it worked and you know be able to kind of get to the level that they needed to get at but

for me i felt i felt largely that it worked and that they were able to kind of demonstrate their roles properly or whatnot like i i agree like i'm in complete agreement that it's like a it's like a visually stunning film he did like you know he puts this this stamp on it where it's like halfway between his own vision and sort of the what's conjured by by herbert and and that's um you know a pretty remarkable achievement because it just never lets up there's always something inventive or new um in terms of how he's imagining these whether it's the you know the harkonnen's planet or like the or the the chambers where they're doing the rituals it all very much has its own visual language that's interesting um i do think

that maybe he does retreat too far into sort of the eschewing of dialogue like um kind of teasing out what what ed was talking about earlier i do feel like it's not that the fremen are totally caricatures he does like do some work to sort of evidence the fact that there's you know disagreements on how you know their liberation project should be carried out but they still do wind up getting like a little bit flattened um and the one thing that i was probably most disappointed in is that in the book like they actually you know they have their own and this is an important point i think that that was missed out It's like they do they have their own plans to sort of reform to try to terraform Dune and to turn it into a habitable planet. And the fact that, you know, Paul comes in and he's promising the green paradise like he gets to as this Messiah figure at the end is like a shortcut over all the work that would happen.

And there's all these fundamentalist people who have been oppressed. And that's really plugs into the fact that there, you know, these people who have been suffering for a long time and struggling under oppressors like the Harkonnens and the Emperor and then the Atreides, like, of course, they want, you know, this, of course, that sounds tantalizing to a long suffering people, but they had their own, you know, plans that I think what the Liet Kynes that that figure is figure is like really sort of missing from from the second half they you know they had plans for ecological transformation so a lot and you're right he really focuses on the religious fundamental fundamentalist aspect and like the and sort of like the colonialism and you know i think he does that that stuff really well

i was just a little a little disappointed and like like Paul's transformation kind of feels like a little also to me, like a little bit underdeveloped as like he just kind of, he does, he just goes for it. You know, he kind of shuns Shani and then he's the Messiah figure. So I do feel like there's a drawback to that, like limited to just like using, relying so much on visual language. Yeah, no, that's a good point because you get you get that scene where they're in siege to bar right and he mentions

that they have the water and they won't but the way that he mentions it it doesn't hint or really communicate that they had a plan to terraform doing themselves it makes it sound like they're hoarding the water so that when shows up then together they'll terraform dune and not that like yeah like you said who's you know is chani's uh parent which is not a piece of the film yeah yeah which is also what yeah because it's like that was a that was something they bonded over the book and they'll cement the romance or kick it off, I think. And not only that, but it almost kind of presents the fact that they have this big store of water as this religious, fanatical, kind of irrational thing, right? And it's just like, oh, it's all down there because this is this religious practice that we have. We would never touch it because of the religious practice.

Right. No one would dare even take a sip from this if they were dying. Maybe Chani and her crowd go down and take a sip every now and then to be like, we don't believe in this. Right, I can see that. It's like, yeah, this is the religious font.

We don't touch it. That is a good point, right? The Fremen do have these plans. They have been waging their war with the Archonians for a while. And because he wants to focus on how quickly the religion can sweep them up, I think, undercuts it so that the stuff that's standing and that feels like Paul gets a grip on is their religious lifestyles and their religious rituals, because it's like almost every time that we get a look into their lives, it's, it's either the religious aspect, which scares parts, the religious aspect,

which Paul can use, you know, like when they're sitting and together and they're eating food, you know, the way in which we learned that their food has spices, because Paul's just kind of like ostracized a little bit feeling like, Oh, they think I'm a false prophet.

Then he has a spice vision. We learned about the water of life ritual because they think that uh the reverend they think that jessica can be their next reverend mother because of the prophecy and so that's the only way that we actually get to look at it right you know like we're shown the lifestyle only in ways in which there's a religious aspect about to be manipulated or to be manipulated yeah i i wonder what you made of some pieces of that like you know as i was watching it a few times like i felt like there were pieces of it that stood out to me a bit more you know with each with each watch and one of them was that you know it seems like paul is really kind of fighting against this prophecy that is

you know kind of presenting him as the the quiz that Haderach and, you know, the Mahdi and all this kind of stuff until they attack Sietch Tabor. And then he feels like, okay, I just need to kind of go with this and kind of take it. And I feel like the other piece of that is Jessica, you know, once she becomes the Reverend Mother is, is very clearly presented as like, okay, we need to move this far. We need to convince everyone that this prophecy is real. Whereas before it seemed like she was a bit more kind of hesitant to take that path and kind of telling them like not to go too fast and, you know, stuff like that.

But it felt to me as though they were presenting it or, or Denis and, you know, the screenwriters were presenting it as though it was in part like Aliyah in her womb after waking up because of the water of life kind of rever mother process was almost like egging her on to make her do more and kind of push this prophecy further. And even when Paul sees her in a vision later, once he drinks the water of life it's like again she's kind of like i'm doing this for you like i'm i'm trying to push this forward like it's like that fetus has a lot of uh you know power in in trying to push this whole prophecy to its end yeah i mean like part of the reason and i'm sure the reason they he might not have communicated

is is because it's like much more of an explicit plot point which is like you know choosing visions where chani and the fremen stay alive over choosing visions where like maybe he gets the revenge and stops the jihad but loses them right yeah by avoiding the south he ends up getting much closer to chani and much closer to the fremen and then gets into position where he doesn't want to use atomics because he's scared that the radioactivity is going to kill Chani and also wants to strike a decisive blow against the Arconans because they, under Fedrotha, are competent and just wipe out all of the resistance in the north.

And that is what throws him to the south where his mother has been you know for the past few months ginning up the the myths about him right i get why they might not have given us insight into his head but that also is like one of the cruxes of the book right you see how much paul's just kind of like overthinking self-doubting yeah because he can see all these alternate paths and ends up self-fulfilling some of them are the prophecies until he realizes he's like narrowed or winnowed the options and is left with a set of horrible ones and chooses the least horrible one which is like tens of billions dead but then

still doesn't fully commit to that because he's scared of one of the inevitable milestones on that path which is like losing johnny and it kind of makes everything worse by virtue of you know just falling in love and like not wanting to give that up which is which is good and interesting and human but also like we they don't that, you know, we don't get that. We just kind of get like a sudden turn, right. Where he, he takes the water of life. And I love that scene where he's just sitting in the stairs with Jessica and you can tell he's almost kind of like resigned or bored.

Cause he sees exactly what's going to happen. Yeah. But like more just out loud speaking of it, I guess, because it doesn't have to be spelled out, but it is helpful to kind of articulate that. See how he's wrestling with it. Yeah. Which you don't as much. Yeah. And that we should also probably point out to those who haven't read the books is one of the bigger deviations. Like in the book, he's like, yeah, I'm a Messiah.

I'm like, I'm not cool. I'm not comfortable with, you how it's good but he kind of accepts this this the mantle and it's less about he's not really and Shani is just kind of like yeah I'm I'm I'm by your side I'm I'm for it and so they kind of introduce some of like the tension and the drama I actually think it's a smart filmmaking choice because it is more compelling to see them kind of you know grapple with what the potential ramifications of embracing one that a path or one of those paths would be but it is interesting the way that he didn't that he did it and he didn't make it as explicit that like

one of his major motivations what that paul's major motivations was trying to keep johnny safe trying to preserve that love and it'll be even more interesting if they do do doon messiah because their relationship is completely different by the end of this movie than it was at the end of the book so it'll be interesting to see how they how they how they square all that probably because of that i like yeah we don't get the time skip we don't get the years that they spent together. And then Chani being like, yeah, of course, this is a political marriage. Instead, we get like, it's right when Chani is starting to feel love for him, you know I'm the Messiah now. And I've decided to embrace it. And not only embrace it, I went into the war council and whipped up everyone into a zealous frenzy, even though I specifically told you I did not want to do that. That felt pretty – because it was like 20 minutes. He's like, well, now it's time.

I did enjoy it, though. I would say I think I like what Denis did where he kind of gave both Chani and Irulan like more of a presence in the film and kind of more of a characterization than they, you know, got in the first Dune film where he saw himself, you know, as a warrior fighting the Sardaukar, you know, in the kind of grand battle that happens at the second, at the end of the second film. And when we actually see that vision play out, it's Chani who was actually in the armor, kind of doing those similar moves as we saw in that vision. I was wondering what you made of, or if you think it's another kind of thing that he's setting up here where in Dune Part 2, Paul also has the vision of Chani kind of getting her face burned with the atomics. Whereas in Messiah, you know, spoiler alert, but it's Paul that that happens to. I wonder if you think that he was kind of setting up another kind of reversal that he wants to do there. Yeah, honestly, I don't, you know, up another kind of reversal that he wants to do there.

Yeah, honestly, I don't, you know, I, I don't know what he I don't know what he's gonna do with that. I mean, Dune Messiah is when the books I mean, they immediately start getting weird. I mean, Dune is a pretty weird book. But like, you know, it starts getting pretty, pretty weird. Although you could see why they would want to do that. They can like bring Jason Momoa back because he's like this clone. But you know yeah the boys in every book spoiler yeah yeah he goes missing halfway through the first new book and then he's around forever yeah but the character named duncan idaho you know you just gotta bring

back right yeah duncan idaho you you never want to get rid of that yeah i think it'll be interesting to see because i think a lot of as a lot of reviewers and a lot of folks have noted that this is it's not even just that Villeneuve like sent like sort of includedizes with as paul becomes less sympathetic and more sort of um potentially uh genocidal uh which again it just which is another thing that just kind of like how and that actually is kind of in the spirit of the books because like so much happens in the last 12 pages of the 800 page dune it's just like he's like oh well do the holy war like okay like boom like all the how you know the well when i finished rereading it recently i i think i texted you and i was like it ended so fast i did i was like there are a few chapters left and i was like how are they gonna wrap this up and i was like oh yeah they do yeah everything gets one sentence like and then

the next yeah yeah which is to say i i think that he'll probably villeneuve will take more liberties even than he did with the second with with with messiah the kind of i bet we'll probably see more zendaya as sort of uh you know uh the moralist because you don't really the weird thing about the dune books as like ed has mentioned before a lot of times is that like after it does do this weird sort of inversion on you where you think it's going to be the hero's journey of paul and then so you're like you're invested in a character as you would be or you would have been like a pulp sci-fi character of the of the 60s or 70s or like of star wars as we know now but then very quickly you see what what's happening. And then it just like,

it doesn't give you much buy for the rest for six more books, you know, five more books. It's very strange. It's meditations on sort of like long term political developments, and you're jumping like 10s of 1000s of years at a time. And it's just so now it becomes far less like obviously, you know, a story that you could sort of convince, you know, mainstream audience goers to just kind of buy into. So I'm really curious to see how if it goes beyond Dune Messiah, I doubt it'll probably go beyond Dune Messiah. Yeah, I can't as much as I would want it. Because I really do think Dune Messiah, I get why you you could end it there but it's really you gotta end it at god emperor you know or or really it's like you gotta end it at children of doom but then you'd end it at children at dune and then everyone's gonna be like okay well what happens

now that the motherfucker put worms all over his body well yeah well get ready let me tell you yeah uh yeah we have the technology to do it i believe velnub said he wants to do one more to like end paul's arc and then stop there paul's gonna walk off into the desert and that'll be that'll be i know this man for him to be such a doom freak and say that's the ending of paul's arc it's not i and i know he knows that i know that's so i think he's lying i think he's gonna he's setting it up with the studio one more time. Yeah. That's what I would do.

Oh, yeah. I mean, if he makes Dune 3 and it does these kind of numbers, then it's like, oh, well, okay. Where's my hand? I guess I have to do the whole series. We're going back to the Dune again. Yeah. So, you know, that's kind of Paul and the religious angle. Of course, I have to give a shout out to Stilgar, who, you know, I love in the film, who is like, you know, our religious fundamentalist a tragedy in there as well where like he's so

bought into this prophecy um and to his messiah that like you know when he's watching the battle like he's he's so invested in it and when he thinks paul is dead like he's gone and then when he realized paul's won like he loses it and he's just so ready for the holy war like he can't wait for it to happen and then when paul says to bring the lands rat to paradise he's like yes we're doing this like you know we're going to kill the billions of people that your vision saw like i i think his character is like one of my favorites in the entire in the entire film yeah mine as well he's a great arab uncle you know he's so funny he's vibing i love also they do such a good job of that dime turn where the zealotry is so funny until it's not until you really hear until you see him kind of cheering

when they get to take them to paradise and you're like oh okay that's yeah it's not funny anymore he's gonna kill a lot of people it's already a three-hour movie so you just have to like pick your battles you have to but like yeah you want i mean i guess that's a that's actually kind of maybe a backhanded compliment to the film is that like you just want you're like i would you know i would love to see him in like some other context too i would love to see like a little bit more interiority of like like what's actually going on here when he's not actually just sort of like cheering for stuff or hoping to see the prophecy come one step closer to fruition um yeah just you know like what i'd said to you i just want i i wanted even

more of the fremen in like the non sort of sort of extreme circumstances and you do get a little bit of it you get and and you do get you know i do appreciate that you know they they have harnessed this this technology um that is is extremely advanced, and they're doing something that nobody else can. And it's certainly not condescending to them. But I just wanted to see more how he plugs into the society other than this kind of a fanatic rabble rouser um my biggest knock on dune now that the two of them have come out is that i mean it is an action movie so like you don't have to ask but i saw it actually like the last movie i saw before this was oppenheimer and i like kind of have a similar knock on on oppenheimer which i didn't love but i'm you give way more latitude

to something like dune because it's science fictional. It's like fantastical. And it's like, yes, but like Oppenheimer just kind of, you know, you, you get like this drum beat, you get the droning score, you're like propelled through this thing and you're given like the visual language to try to process what's happening. But Oppenheimer, I really found like, was like just like a series of kind of like one-liners, like almost like a series series of trailers that stacked together until it made a whole movie. And then, yeah, almost to the point where Paul gets a vision of Zendaya and the face melting. And Oppenheimer's giving the speech, and he sees after the bomb's been dropped and you're sort of, it signifies the horror, but many of the dimensions of it are sort of left unexplored,

but then like the soundtrack blares on and you're pulled onto the next scene. I think there's something to be said and we don't necessarily, that's maybe more of like a film theory or film critic sort of discussion than what we're going to have today. But I think that like, it's a very similar mold and almost style of of kind of filmmaking where you're you are relying on

a lot on sort of like on visual metaphor and sort of like very uh blunt sort of sonic cues and you're just like and scenes almost kind of don't end and begin they kind of just like sweep into the next one um and yeah it's i enjoyed dune dune more um because yeah it wasn't like trying to make a comment on actual history or the context or something like that but yeah all that's to say that like yeah that still guard he's played like he's it's a great character great characterization played really well but um i wonder if he does ultimately sort of transcend what he's meant to signify in the film that's a good point i i felt like that especially in the middle like there was a lot of that kind of scene scene scene like i kind of felt things were kind of blurring together a bit um yeah i still

loved it i I was still, you know, fascinated. Oh yeah. It's a great ride. Yeah, totally. They do it. Yeah.

Um, another piece of this, like every time I see the Benny Jesseret and hear them talk about, you know, their plans and how they've been like going over 90 centuries to like, you know, have this kind of eugenic project where they're trying to build up this Kwisatz Haderach, this like person with, you know,

the right breeding to bring about, you know, this, this Messiah or whatever you want to call it. I always think back to like the long-termists who, you know, we hear about in like modern kind of tech politics and like, you know, how they're trying to plan out for like the million years in the future and blah blah blah and all this kind of stuff and like they're totally into selective breeding and choosing the right uh embryos and and the types of kids to have and all this kind of stuff to like you know move their genetic line forward and and

whatnot and like obviously you know the benny jessert have been around long far longer than it as like a story concept than um you know our silicon valley crazy people today but yeah it it just always stands out to me and and i i don't know i i find them to be like a fascinating uh kind of group within this world and like the the role that they play in the politics of you know these great houses and you know the the that they play in the politics of you know these great houses and you know the the imperium and all this kind of stuff i love that that's so funny like yeah i mean it's because i think you never and i almost wish this was a line that both herbert and uh and the filmmakers sort of played with a little bit more because like,

it's never, it could all just be full of shit. Right. But I mean, but then again, but then, then it's like, oh, well, they can't actually control people with their minds. And there is the voice like that. We see that working to some extent in the, in the film. Like I almost, part of me wishes that there was like more doubt cast on on all of that but that that that is a really that is a really funny point because you know by the end of the second film it's pretty clear what a noxious effect all this like this has and you know all of this is it's very bleak it's all like you can you forget how bleak like this kind of wine especially since they don't quite make explicit like as a as ed

said like they're that like tens of billions of people are just like beginning to die at the end of this film like the universe is just is being cleansed in a helly you know in a holy war uh in this jihad that it's like it's really horrific what he intended you know to to do with this and where he intended it to go and the you know the benedicts are like well you know, to do with this and where he intended it to go. And the, you know, the Bene Gesserit are like, well, you know, we're finding that path for like, you know, long term. And so even if like a lot of people die, it'll be okay. Yeah.

So yeah, the EA thing is like a really funny, funny plug in there. I just see Grimes in like one of those outfits, like, you know, talking about how they're planning to make sure they have the right bloodlines and like all this because i can't see like obviously it's a it's a women's thing right and then there's not so many women to point to in silicon valley but like grimes has certainly been like elon pilled um yeah so yeah i think yeah it's really interesting also because it's like now it feels like now more than then we are starting to get back to, we're getting towards Silicon Valley beliefs. That would meld well with that, right?

This sort of idea that if you can create a person that lives forever or lives for a much longer time, can't create ai but we can like use other memories to function as like the sort of parallel processing power for you and by virtue of that make you as close to a computer as possible while still having a flesh body um and here we have silicon value i mean like you know let's do uh eugenics let's do biometric surveillance on ourselves let's um you know let's try to achieve senescence senescence whatever the fuck it is where you extend the telomeres at the end to make sure that cellular division doesn't eventually result in you know mistakes and mutations um and cell death. There's this weird attempt to make an uber-mench that converges with a lot of what the Bene Gesserit have. Though I think Herbert was trying to make a different point

with having the Bene Gesserit and the voice and these sort of modes of control versus where it feels like Silicon Valley is just more or less interested in doing it. One, because it came, and two, because this aligns with the vision that they have, which also aligns with the nightmare of Dune, right? This strict caste-based eugenics rule with stable, unstable political arrangements where you have a tripod of institutions and they all hate

each other in one way or another but they're all being puppeteered by one specific uh secret society that is for the good of mankind doing eugenics and for the good of mankind you know maintaining this pretty horrible system because that's the other thing right they don't ever i don't remember if the books articulate why they want the quiz that chatterbox other than like this is just like a form of power that no one's ever had before and we will be more powerful it's like okay why do you why do you want to give birth to god you know why do you want yeah why because we can because like all these silicon valley guys trying to make agi like why oh because it's inevitable and we must yeah the funny thing though about that comparison is that like the the

benedict like they have like so much more like discipline yeah like like the silicon valley guys are just like you know like i want to live as long as possible i want to give me my survival bunker get me to mars yeah there's no little goblins you know i think, I want to live as long as possible. I want to give me my survival bunker. Get me to Mars. We're all little goblins, you know? I think that is the big difference. There are a few of them that I think style themselves as disciplined ideologues or disciplined long-term thinkers. You know, Teal and his mentors and his inspirations is like cultivating a network. And they're not.

You know, they're still petulant children, and they still also have to deal with the fact of the matter, which is like in Dune, the societies are all more or less aligned on the same political program, whereas here they're still in the very early stages of a counter-revolution. In the first stage, it's like, how do we convince people we don't need liberalism you know how do we convince people we don't they don't need democracy that they don't need uh this package of rights you know and and and from then you know once we win that war making it permanent and then going and marching on forward right so they're still in the very early stages uh and can be nipped in the bud unlike the bene gesserit we're like even by the end of the dune series the bene gesserit are kind of part of the solution even though they've created all of this

yeah even though they're scheming malevolently through the whole thing and that and this is probably like a good sort of segue into the the butlerian jihad which were which is sort of like the overarching uh theme that we that we want to want to talk about today which is that and i and the thing probably but more than anything that i'm interested in talking with both of you about is is how do we even conceive or like sort of position the butlerian jihad in terms of sort of this is like all the result of this other path where computers and compute computation and artificial intelligence and thinking machines have been banished and we get this this like totally sort of bizarre feudal society where just like you know

galactic genocides unfurl and it seems like also a pretty uh pretty pretty nasty situation there too um and yeah and like what do we make of the fact that that it has been sort of stricken like from the record so to speak of these films at this time where like it's like balerian jihad is not like talked about a lot or in great detail it just like pops in there at the books as you as you both know but it is also like foundational it's on like page 11 of the book or whatever page 13 it's like here's why things are as they are it's because of this and it's because of that quote that you gave up front and they're quoting from like it's something that everybody understands it's something that informs everybody so i i just to hijack your podcast for a second,

what, what do you, what do you have a collective discussion here? So there we go. Yeah. So what do we make of the fact that a, the name and the idea is never made explicit in either of these films. And then be like,

you know, that this sort of like twisted galactic society is the result of this idea that has a lot to recommend it. I think it's an interesting choice. I think it's not entirely surprising given, like we were saying, how Villeneuve likes to really focus on not putting so much dialogue and just kind of showing things wherever he can um so you do see you know the mentat in the first film through fear how it kind of doing the computation and of course the harkonnen one as well um you know kind of doing the mental computation you get that image there of like okay the human is the computer what does that actually mean but you don't get the explicit kind of detailing of why you know the society is like

this and what led to there not being computers all around you know what what led to you know this particular development of these technologies and why spice and you know the drugs that kind of make your uh brain start to act like that have become such an important substance it is it is interesting to me that he did omit that though, right? Because there is in the very first, in the first movie, there's that, there's that scene like really early on. It's just like very clearly an exposition dump where he's like, he's got like an iPad and he's like, huh?

Like, you know, and it's like the Fremen live on Arrakis and they control the spice, which makes interplanetary space travel possible. Like you could have, you could have just had like, I mean, and a lot of filmmakers probably would have just had like the next scene being like,

this is necessarily necessary because of the Balerian Jihad and the year blah, blah, blah, where, and you can like a little grainy, you know, shot of,

of robots, like, right. Like Ned Ludd. So I'm just curious. I mean, I would love to curious i i mean i would love to i was i would love to to to get obviously denis villeneuve's thoughts on on this but i wonder if he ever considered putting it into the into the film more explicitly or if or if again if he

would if he would do it today now that it's just like such a hot button and some studio exec would probably be like well are you gonna like what do you what does this have to say about ai are you gonna i don't think it needs to be in there for the record i'm just curious what you guys make of the choice yeah i mean part of me thinks it's like also because i feel like he cuts also to the bone things that don't directly go along with the plot it's like he cut the mentats even though they have a role they're in the first one yeah they're in the first one there were there were scenes in the second one but they were cut yeah right and because because it's after after uh it's it's it's what would be the second half of the book, right? That the tradies Mentat is working for Laraconis, right?

And that is also a scene that's important because it's like he shows up in the final fight, right? Fade Ratha has that poison blade, tries to kill Paul through trickery, and instead Thufir dies in Paul's arms, right? But he cuts him in that whole arc because of course he goes in a different direction with the ending. So I don't know. I think, you know, part of me feels like if it doesn't have a direct reference to a plot

engine or a plot gear, then he gets rid of it, which is a shame because it would just also be fun to have that explicit, more explicitly excavated. I mean, I think the world is so alien enough that people, you know, when they look at for Dune explainers or when they try to see why the world is the way that it is come across almost in the first,

or if not the first sentence, first paragraph, some explanation that ties it back to the Butlerian Jihad, but it would be nice for the, it would be fun for the film if only to have that be something that's a little bit more in the public consciousness and to have maybe some discussion of it yeah i think because i think it's cool i think it only enriches the whole thing right like it's like oh this is why you know they have technology but it's so different and it operates so differently and it's it's sort it sort of engages with society so differently. You wonder, to the extent that Herbert really had that as a foundational or something that informed his thinking through it,

I wonder if it's just, for him, it's a way to just kind of be free from the strictures of just like having to imagine like how technology would function in all these ways and it's a really smart way to do that if you're you want to write a galactic epic about you know men melding with giant toothed worms you know in the desert and it's fun because it puts all these constraints on combat that then like yeah so many series afterwards copy but don't copy the rationale or have to come up with a different one right if you have a series with computers why you still have knives oh well maybe it's like ship to ship combat is like boarding because if you have guns then it will pierce the hole and you don't want to depressurize and do suicide runs unless you do. And maybe that's a whole other thing. Right. But yeah,

because then, you know, like you said, it is a smart conceit. It's one of my favorite ones because in general, my favorite sci-fi is one where, you know, maybe there's some fantastical elements, but I like, I like, you know, when there's not FTL, when there's not devices or technologies that make it almost impossible to have, like duels almost. And that when those things are present in the universe, you feel it as a massive shift, the way you would in our world. If there's a fucking killer drone on the battlefield you know that changes things necessarily right and how people approach the battle then if it's just conventional

weaponry um and it's something that people just it's something that people relate to like look even though it's not in the film and that it's like it's like it's like almost a i don't know if it's like reached meme status but like it's a rat like you see you know people are like you know butlerian jihad when yeah online i'll like to to this and that so it's like it's in the consciousness and it's something that people are responding to we do like your computers i think everybody on some level wants to hurt ads computers you know algorithms yeah it is like even though it's not explicit in the film it's still certainly resonating especially in this moment right now i do think it's interesting that like the idea of the butlerian jihad of course you know these are published the first dune is

published in in the 60s um and it's both of course, the moment when you have this kind of growing interest in psychedelics, of course, which is why you have Spice and all this kind of stuff. But there's also the increasing use of computers and the beginning of the computerization of things that are going on in society. And there is growing critique of what that is going to look like and what it's going to mean. And so, yeah, I think it's interesting to look back at a we are angry with like what silicon valley has produced these past couple decades and kind of the impact of this highly commercialized digital revolution that you know now our social media platforms are all crap and the ais are turning out all this garbage content and like the journalism industry is like on its last legs and stuff. Whereas these kind of critiques of what

these technologies are doing to society and like doing to humanity are not something that just emerges right now that just emerges in the past decade or so with like this most recent turn against what the tech industry is doing, but rather is connected to this much longer kind of history of criticism of these things or concern about what this form of technology, computers, and then what kind of builds on it is actually doing to humanity. Of course, you know, going right back to finding these influences in a book like Dune. Yeah. No, I mean, I think that's all that's spot on because, you know i mean the dune was published what 1965 so yeah it's like mid-60s yeah yeah the sort of the beginning of the you know of the first so-called computer revolution when you're looking at like sort of ibm as being yeah sort of one of

the big and you know apple is not long long down the pike and sort of the increasing sort of the the amount the extent to which you know the the public is is aware of and or beginning to interact with with computational like technologies um and blow it up you know yeah yeah yeah and an immense amount and i think as yeah i think malcolm harris's book did a really good job of like contextualizing the fact that like a lot of this is being done in conjunction with you know the department of defense and the war machine at the time where you know it's all being put in service of um so like there is there is you know and it you know herbert was certainly not like a a lefty radical he was he was his own sort of strange blend of reactionary,

but you did at the same time have like the students for a democratic society and people like sort of like vocally opposing, you know, certain kinds of computation, especially because they were being used to carry out, to help like, you know, pinpoint targets for, in the Vietnamese war. And so you can see a lot of sort of, you know, the rejection of that.

And it's, what's more interesting to me is the fact that we had that like that critique sort of like kind of like fell by the wayside instead of you know for for a number not not totally of course there's always been been good critics but like you know today it feels like we have entered another cycle where there is a more widespread fervor for for opposing this stuff where there's more support for those who are resisting it and yeah it is it is interesting to talk about doing it and i would love to i would love to you know drill into the filmmakers my because again it just it seems like it's oh it's allowing this conversation to open up in some interesting ways but this the film really isn't necessarily about that.

It's about the religious fundamentalism and colonialism, which also have a lot of, you know, resonance today. Of course, I need to like put in a request to see if Dylan, Danny Villeneuve will be with me. Yeah.

Yeah. It'd be a laugh. I'd be up for it. You know, I guess kind of refocusing on what you're both talking about, what we're all talking about, you know, this notion of the Butlerian Jihad is, you know, this important plot point in the Dune universe that happens 10,000 years before the story that Frank Herbert is telling in the first Dune and in the books that come after. And of course, you know, his son writes a whole load of books later too, writes one specifically about the Butlerian Jihad. I think that there's like debate about how canonical, you know, his telling of the Butlerian Jihad is and how that kind of relates to what Frank Herbert himself imagined the Butlerian Jihad as being. Because I know Brian Herbert, the son introduces like a bunch of mechs and things like, I haven't read the book, but I've read a bit about it. But anyway, the notion is that these computers, these technologies that we're familiar with today are reaching this point. And of course, both of you feel free to correct me or add to this, but reaching this point basically where they're basically called thinking machines in the book, where they are reaching this this level where they are kind of intelligent. They're taking over.

They are commanding this increasing power. You know, think of kind of what Sam Altman and people like that are talking about today when they talk about AGI and, you know, the robots kind of taking over and whatnot. But essentially, you know, the society, the world kind of of fights back against that kind of defeats this vision these technologies um of course there's a uh you know what a decline in living standards maybe we could put it that way as as a result of what happens there um but then of course they develop this alternative where they start to you know kind of develop these human computers who are able to like the mentats you know do these calculations in their minds or the Bene Gesserit who have these particular kind of skills with their minds and their voice

and all this kind of stuff. And then of course the Spacing Guild, that is what kind of allows all this intergalactic travel and stuff. And they're like weirdly, they're like deformed as a result of using all the spice and whatnot. But you have kind of, I think when we use the term technology today, we think of digital

technologies, right. And we think of computers, but in a way you could almost say that they develop a different kind of technology that is more kind of organic or biological, um, in how they're going to try to make this world work. How would you both kind of reflect on that? Are there pieces of what I'm missing when I describe that what would you want to add to it well i would just add to that i think that it one of the most i think prescient things that herbert noted is that like he in like the very few sentences that are actually like explicitly sort of dedicated to explaining the butlerian jihad in in the books He does make it a point to say that, you know, as you said up front,

that it's not just that like these, these quote thinking machines arose and that's what was so scary about him. But it's the fact that it permitted other men with machines to enslave them. So it was always a matter of sort of making the power more powerful, giving them tools to exploit and immiserate others. And that's a really key, I think, distinction.

And that like separates it from like a Skynet type vision where it's just like, oh, we unleashed the machines and now we are fighting them it was like it's always a matter of of of machinery or technologies or thinking machines you know tilting the balance in you know in sort of i mean it's interesting that then which like that sort of you know points to a certain kind of like techno fascism where the where you know the men with the most power enslave other people. And then in the alternate society where the people have done the butler and Jihab, rejected the machines, and then you also wind up with

another sort of weird... Nice feudal system. Whichever way we go, there's no hope. It's like like pick your poison yeah i wonder what you think about that ed i've been there's a series i've been reading lately it's uh red rising by pierce brown and in it i've read the first three of those yeah i really like

it because the premise is that the fascists win and they create a nightmare society and there's a revolution against there and one weird element of it is this similar commitment to not having thinking machines present it ends up they've recreated a roman empire and through their obsession of role-playing as romans this sense this vague sense of honor that compels them to not use machines, instead slaves, human slaves, but a refusal to let anything that seems to be close to the verge of artificial or autonomous intelligence not exist. And in this series, as it goes on to the later few books, it's like this libertarian capitalist who starts introducing thinking machines or things that approximate thinking machines into the warfare

and into the civil war that's been raging it starts to shift the dynamics and how people relate to the technology and then i think that you know when you have a sci-fi universe where the question is like okay what do you do with technology there are like left and right reasons to end up at that same place where we don't want um thinking machines to emerge i think similar to like the romantic versus the humanist versus the materialist tech critic camps right that um evgeny morozov outlined in um his criticism of tech criticism, right? You can have some people maybe like Tristan Harris's and Jason Lanner's of the you might have objections because like in one way or another they are taking away the autonomy of human being or competing with human beings in this or

that task whereas like there are the deeper reasons i think the reasons we're you know aligned with with this and why and why converges or can converge with buddh Buddhism is like the introduction of these, of machines, of automation, of, you know, algorithmic oversight is usually done in ways that are not, that have almost nothing to do with like anything other than expanding production and almost in always in ways that, you know, come at the cost of the human beings in ways that we are already uncomfortable with, right? The world that we have already at the expense of people concerns itself with seeking profits. And a world giving more armaments and more capacity to do that is just going to accelerate that process.

And so then the concern is like, well, yeah, yes, it might degrade the quality of creative work. Yes, it might make general day-to-day life more miserable and take away from being a human. But it also just generally makes the world worse because we have a political and economic system that makes the world worse. And we can imagine a political and economic system where you integrate higher and higher levels of technology into people's lives. And it doesn't have to be some fully automated you know luxury space communism but you can imagine a system where you get rid of the drudgery of work or the drudgery of creative work or the drudgery of physical work right you can imagine a world where it's used to like you know to ensure that people

have more leisure have more money that they take home or more resources that they take home. But none of that is pursued in the design, in the innovation, in the financing of these machines. And so I think that why, even though Perberts are reactionary, that quote and some of the weird, wasy gestures towards it do kind of capture the essence of an opposition to mindless automation or intentional automation and innovation by the hands of or at the hands of people who already have little interest in what we want in a society, right?

They're interested in more profits. They're interested in more power. They're interested in more autonomy for themselves at everyone's expense, because that is the way in which power and privilege grow. It's at at everyone's expense. Because that is the way in which power and privilege grow. It's at everyone else's expense. And so Herbert, even though he's nuts, truly nuts, he cooked with that. He hit that on the head and understood that in whatever system it is, especially one where when people have power over one another they use it to

to take away you know take their autonomy away or cultivate their own autonomy at the expense of others um adding thinking machines adding automated modes of governance adding you know ways of subtly influencing people just lead to the worst possible outcomes yeah yeah i think you're right and i think that he would i mean i think i the vibe is and this is just like purely speculation from just having read the books and a little bit about herbert is just that like that like as like fucked as the you know the dune empire in the universe and galactic fiefdoms and everything is it would have been even more fucked if if things proceeded on course with uh you know with because at least this opens up all these these vistas of like of like thought and like experimenting with spice and far-flung worlds

and you know it's it's intensely creative and interesting. And it's just like that you can, you get the sense that like, that all that is in reaction to like things just kind of like being drilled down to like sort of like numb, dull, like techno-fascism. And that's kind of what needed to be blown up. And I, you know, I, yeah, you can't count any of the i think his son's books is no i can't like i just i've tried to read some of them and like no like i mean everybody yeah you know he's trying their best out there but like it's like the the wild thing is like

herbert is just like he like i know you might not like him at all. You may like hate his writing, but he's a wild like writer. Like he has a prose style. It's like things are just like there's italics and like things are just splaying all over and like words that are just sort of like smashed together. And it's like it's it's fun and it can be weird and dense. And it's but it's but and then his his son is just kind of, and then they got on the spaceship. Like, I'm not trusting you to explain the mother. Someone said that they have all this writing comes from like four floppy disks of Herbert's notes. And they were like, this is basically the Book of Mormon. You know, this is just fan fiction.

And when you're not allowed to look at the source material whatsoever, but please trust us, it's there. He left the ducks behind. I find it interesting that picking up on what you were saying, one of the things that obviously defines a lot of what we've received from the tech industry for a long time, but particularly the ideas that they've been trying to kind of force on us over the past, you know, decade or so come from science fiction, right? This notion that we are going to colonize Mars and that's the first step to becoming this multi-planetary, multi-galactic species. Or, you know, these wider notions of like how technology should be implemented in our societies,

whether we're going to kind of live in the metaverse or kind of be doing all these other things like science fiction is so key to inspiring so many of the visions, or at least justifying so many of the visions that these tech folks are trying to force on us today. And I think that goes for AI as well, like, right, the idea that, you know, we're going to be achieving this AGI, or that it's something that we should be able to achieve. I think a goes for AI as well, right? The idea that we're going to be achieving this AGI or that it's something that we should be able to achieve. I think a lot of these ideas are science fictional. And that's part of the reason that they're pushing this on us because they've read so many stories or so many science fiction tales where there are these computers, there are

these robots that are able to think like humans or act like humans. And they think that this is something that should be achieved. And they think it's something that is actually achievable Sure. You know, the, the actual world that they live in is not one that we would want to aspire to, but at least you have this kind of foundational event that kind of at least says to you, you know, you don't need to accept all of these things as, you know, inevitable, right. That, that all of these technologies are going to develop and they're going to do their thing and there's nothing that you can do to stop them. I think that there's something welcome in the idea of the Butlerian Jihad that says, if you are kind of collectively angry enough at these technologies and how people in particular are using these technologies,

you can fight back, you can challenge them. you can say, you know, this has no place in our society. And we should think up something else in order to, you know, see what kind of our technological future is going to be, because it doesn't necessarily need to be mass computerization, everything has a screen and an internet connectivity and voice control and all this kind of stuff that Silicon Valley has been trying to push on us for 10 or 15 years, that we can have a different vision of what technology should look like in a modern society that we live in. It doesn't have to be the one that's foisted on us by these powerful people who see particular commercial interest in it. And I think then that is kind of, I guess, a question for you guys in the sense of, I feel like we're at this moment now where after this few decades of this digital revolution, where we've been having the building of these algorithmic systems and pushing computers out on us and making sure everything has the internet in it, that for a long time, even if there were problems with it, there were tangible benefits that came from it, right. But I feel like one of the things that we've been seeing over the

past number of years, that's just been accelerated with this push for generative AI is the continual erosion of those benefits that we are receiving. And the increase, you know, the continual increase of the drawbacks that come with it, right, you know, what we're seeing with journalism right now, and, you know, how everything is just filled with garbage AI content and, you know, on and on and on. You know, are we reaching a point where it becomes not only possible but necessary to have a conversation about having something like a Butlerian Jihad where we say this path, this trajectory that this industry, that these powerful people have put us on is unacceptable is not benefiting us and it's time to think about something different so yeah no i think that there is something powerful in it and that's again we're getting back to what we were talking about earlier how we just wish it was like a little bit more explicit in this film so it could be a little bit more of a touch uh touchstone for folks who are having these anxieties right now and it was just like because yeah no i do think

that's a powerful thing that it's like even if you know these uh you know uh even if a lot of what happens in this universe is is is not great here's this rich alternate world in which this vision that isn't being shoved down our throats does not succeed. Like this is a different, it's a, it's a different world with a different set of, of, of, of values and completely radically re-imagined. And you could, you can, you can imagine sort of, you know, you may be up to the giant worm human hybrid being, you know, different. Pass on that piece of it. Yeah. And that's, I think also. And you know, the, the holy war of it yeah and that's i think also you know the

holy war where billions of people are killed besides that too yeah but but i think i mean i do think that it's useful to say that you need to think that you know we're again we're doing a kind of a lot with with with a little of actual text here to go on but it does seem that, you know, one point that you could extrapolate is that, you know, these kinds of wild sort of Bene Gesserit generational sort of searching for a chosen one or using mind powers unlocked by a spice, you know, that seems radical too. But imagine that it must have gotten to a certain point 10,000 years ago before this came, where there needed to be not just sort of, it's not called like the Butlerian like resistance, it's called the Butlerian jihad, where we know the role that a jihad plays in the Dune universe. We know how all consuming it is and how bad things had to get in order to see one. So I think that there may be like sort of a word of warning here that if there isn't, you know, any sort of course correction or actual or resistance or rejection of certain technologies, then yeah, like the equivalent of sort of blowing up server farms or whatever is something you know

that that that could well well take place i certainly don't think herbert is like endorsing the butlerian jihad as like a means of action i do think that he's like putting it on the table as something that could potentially happen in our universe if you know something like silicon valley has continues to accrue power in the way that it kind of has yeah and just to be clear from what you're saying in malcolm harris's book palo alto he explains that history of how people used to bomb computer centers you know back in i think it was like the 60s or the 70s or something um you know they bombed the hbc house they bought they bought the ceo they just firebombed like they you were yeah it was a lot more dangerous back then so they had the names and

addresses of executives circling around on the list yeah yeah yeah and i think we kind of forget that that piece of the history today right when we think about oh you know we can't push back on these tech companies it's like at a much earlier stage like people were much more aggressive on these things and i think what you say is really important where it's like you know, we can't push back on these tech companies. It's like at a much earlier stage, like people were much more aggressive on these things. And I think what you say is really important where it's like, you know, if we're not going to start reining things in now, we're going to reach a point where it's going to be like burn this whole thing down

and start over because it's just completely unacceptable. Ed, what do you think? Yeah, I mean, you know, I think we can definitely, you know, one thing I think is there need to be more defenses of sabotage. And I think we're getting there, you know. How to Blow Up a Pipeline and In Defense of Looting by Andreas Baum and Vicky Osterweil, respectively, are both really great texts that kind of just are trying to integrate this idea people have that clearly creates a moral version for them with the destruction of property. And viewing looting in a specific,

and different arguments that come up. Looting as, you know, having racial animus around it, and then blowing a pipeline as being terrorism and counterproductive and uh irresponsible and so on and so forth right and thinking about ways in which you know you can kind of invert it and give people the tools necessary and the arguments necessary to actually defend not just you know i think the tendency what the tendency is to do now, which is if someone does it, be like, well, I'm not condoning it, but you can understand why someone's doing it. To shift from that to being like, well, yeah, we should be doing that.

People should be doing sabotage, whether it's in their workplace or of a place that they think is causing harm. Because, you know, one of the things I've had a huge problem with is for years and years and years, especially liberal commentators like to say that Facebook is the greatest threat to our civilization or to our informational civilization. And then what's the solution? You know, call your congressman or something, you know, if this this company which has an oversight board right you know if it's the greatest threat then why are we not attacking the physical infrastructure right i'm not no one's advocating for what is i think the hard line which is like you know hurting anyone but we are advocating for disruption of its functions to impose that as a cost and to that in of itself is a radicalizing act that galvanizes other groups of solidarity and experimentation and further direct action

right yeah i i think it's interesting to see that evolution especially with the self-driving cars going back like the summer last year where first it was coning and we're shutting them down and even that by just like placing an or like gently placing an orange traffic cone on the hood of a waymo car was enough to get google and gm to say like oh we're gonna find who's responsible and you know file criminal vandalism charges for gently placing a cone to then someone took a sledgehammer to them and And then a few weeks ago, somebody threw a firework inside one and threw it underneath.

We're seeing like the boundaries of what's possible sort of, you know, evolving. And, you know, in the face of, I think it's important to note, like utter intransigence from the tech companies themselves who are seeing things like this. And then,

well, and it kind of unrelated, but there was also the, did you see the, there's some, there's like a German group called the vault, the volcano group that they cut the wires to the Tesla gigafactory. Yeah.

Which is again, closed for a few days now. Yep. Yep. So there's, there's actual, and it's actual direct action. And both of these cases are,

you know, examples where like you can be pretty sure that nobody's going to get hurt you have a driverless car that's like holding up traffic and pissing people off and then you have you know some cables on the on the ground so it is a moment combined with everything we were talking about earlier with the you know this this ai which i think is uh the generative ai is a unique technology and that it's social benefits is so minimal compared to like what you could at least, you know, Google could like rightfully say like,

Hey, we're giving you access to the world's information. Like this is a new thing. You couldn't just like Google a fact and like find the, like that, that's new. Now they're saying, Oh,

well we can kind of like mash up some art that we vacuumed up into our database and spit out a new picture for you. Like, okay, great. Yeah. What does that do for me? You know, like, okay, this can write a marketing email. That doesn't mean anything to a lot of people. And yet it is this incredibly disruptive force.

So all of this anger is, and I think I wrote about this on my newsletter. And it was, I think that that's all getting sort of pulled up into these more tangible targets we have now, like self-driving cars and then now like the Gigafactory. You know, it's hard to, you know, attack a server farm because there's a lot of security and that takes like coordination. And but if you're mad at big tech in a sort of you know a more generalized level and then here comes like a waymo car like it's going to run over your dog then yeah you you know that's a target right there i think things are absolutely getting interesting and i and it's it's an interesting tea you just like the butler in jihad it's not again it's not in the text of the film it's not like that but it's it's an interesting tea you just like the butler in jihad it's not again it's not in the text of

the film it's not like that but it's it's ever online it's like it's like become people don't even necessarily know that it's related to to do these people online going like i thought this had something to do with like judith butler yeah that many times yeah yeah we'll get her we'll get her. We'll get her in Dorsa. That'll be a nice one. There we go. Yeah. I do think it's interesting, though, to think about how these things are escalating. And I wonder when it reaches the point when we actually see someone attack a data center or something, right? Because with the data centers, it's not just like they're out there and we're not thinking about them. It's like, there are a lot of communities, a growing number of communities that are very angry about the location of these data centers near their communities because of the energy use, because of the water use, you know, it depends on the particular area in which those are worse.

But like, you know, I spoke to a researcher in the UK who's from Chile who told me about, you know, how a community in Santiago in Chile basically stopped one of these Google data centers from being built because of the amount of water that it was going to require. And they were worried because the company was so, you know, unwilling to share information that it was going to use so much water that it was going to force them back to using water trucks instead of having like water piped into their homes, right? Like this is the real kind of level of things that people in some parts of the world are facing when it comes to these rollout of these technologies and what is required to make these technologies work that can, you know, be hidden from view, but that a lot of people are increasingly waking up to and are saying like, this is completely unacceptable. This has gone too far, especially as, as I was saying, the benefits of this supposed revolution, internet revolution, whatever you want to call it, seem to be degrading day by day because of, you know, one, the AI push, but on the other hand, like just the

increased pressures of commercialization and of profit making that are eroding even like the benefits of the google search engine and the and what we used to like about social media and stuff like that like none of it can last anymore because everything needs to be commercialized to the maximum degree possible as these companies seem to be kind of hitting a ceiling with what they can roll out and the money that they can make. And it does seem that we're at this point where we're kind of at a breaking point. Yeah, it does. For all of those reasons, too, I think, you know, coal plants that were planned to shutter are being, their lifespans are being extended to power these generative AI firms. And, you know, I spent a lot of time arguing in my column last year that that's one big reason that we had to see this concerted effort to generate just unrelenting hype about what this was going to do, even if it veered into apocalyptic territory.

Just because they had to make the case that this thing was so powerful that we all had to sort of like buy into it now um because you had to get you know the you you had to get like the the horse in front of the wagon because if you didn't then people are saying well wait what now like what now why are we like keeping uh why why are we you know diverting our water supplies and like not decommissioning our coal plants like why why are we doing this um and and it becomes more of a moral issue and i do think that that's like that this again this film comes at this interesting point where we do have there's this nexus where it's like being recognized as a moral issue not like what does this technology mean but like should we be doing this should we be going down this road at all like should we should we be countenancing the generative ai as like an endeavor as as what silicon valley uh you

know forecast as its vision for all of it should it is kind of a point where uh where where there we can sort of view it almost more as a binary And we have seen some instances where people have been successful in, um, in taking the negative, right? We saw the writer's strike say, you know, last, last year around this, and we saw them say no. And it's not like they banished, uh, generative AI from the face of the earth or from their, even from their, their purview, but they did oppose it and win. Um, so it's, I So I think there's a space that's open now and there's more people than ever who are interested in talking about this,

interested in taking action. Since leaving the column, I've been talking to- RIP column. Yeah, RIP, critical tech column. But yeah, but I've been talking to folks with the California california labor federation freelance solidarity people are like ready to get boots on the ground and you know i'll you know ed can be the george meller of the ledites with the actual hammer leading the uh

i'll you know i maybe i'll be the gravener henson trying to rally in the pub rooms. But maybe I'll have the hammer too. I don't know. You have a hammer also. I think you can see the hammer. Yeah, I can see it. There was a point last night.

I was like, I've just been driving around with this sledgehammer in the back. See something, do something. You see a driver with a it was funny in oakland after the we we did some led i tried yeah we put put tech on trial and paris and i went out to get get a drink afterwards and i was just carrying around the hammer around oakland just because i didn't you know i didn't want to leave it at the bar right but so we were like you are you open? Yeah. He's like, you're going to have to leave your hammer. When we were in New York, I had to pick up the hammer to, to bring to the event. And, uh, I was like coming down the elevator, uh, with the hammer and there was this like old couple next to me and they were like, um, what's the hammer for?

I was like, I was like, it's okay. We're just smashing technology. They were like, okay. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. I love it. magazine last year talking about dropping bombs or even nukes on data centers and i was like yeah like i would kind of be up for that but for such different reasons yeah i'm not concerned about the agi but i'm still up for bombing the data centers and getting rid of them um guys this has been a fantastic chat to to end it off you know any final comments and who who who's your favorite

standout character in the film any final comments on the butler and jihad the luddite stuff but also give me your fave i mean fave rotha was just amazing you know austin butler i've heard him slip into the elvis voice a few times yeah but it's okay you know there's a little little bit of that in there yeah mix between stelen and and elvis i love how much of a fucking freak he was especially i love the cut away from the room where she gives him the test was so funny to me because they're like can we control him we can control him with humiliation and pain and she's like no actually he likes those things we cannot do that yeah i think i'm gonna go with uh rebecca ferguson i think she really she becomes that reverend mother pretty like i feel like like that every few years uh hollywood like kind of like has

a round table and they decide they're like who's gonna be our lady of sci-fi and like for a while it was uh scarlett johansson she was in like lucy and upon and under under the skin and her great film and her yeah i always sell donna a bit for a while uh-huh yeah and now it's very much i feel like rebecca ferguson between this and this and silo and yeah i haven't watched that yet i need to do that the book's really good too you should check out the book i have a i have a signed copy of one of his books i don't know if it's that one but yeah yeah i was i was digging it like the it starts out a little stronger than it than it goes on to be because it's a full but but it's it's it's compelling it's it's it's it's a swing it's a swing i the one thing i do appreciate about apple is it's, it's compelling. It's, it's, it's, it's a swing. It's a swing. The one thing I do appreciate about Apple is it's like doing all these sci-fi

swings and Rebecca Ferguson's in like half of them. So, so that's, that, that that's my shout and yeah, just another sort of underlining of the fact that, you know, this, that, that, that it's, it's very interesting and very notable. And I'm, I'm glad we're having this conversation at this moment because whether or not the Butlerian Jihad is in the movie, like people have just gone to lengths to extract it from the movie, from the text, made it a meme because it's in the air.

It's just yet another reflection of sort of the increasing warranted, justified hostility that people are feeling towards, you know, what big tech and these generative AI companies in particular at this moment are doing right now. So yeah, interesting times for sure. Totally, definitely interesting times. I feel like it's so hard to choose a favorite because there are so many great performances and like fascinating characters i feel like i already gave a shout out to stilgar earlier so i'll leave him off because i i do i do love him very much i i still love i still love uh stellan sarsgaard as the baron um i i think that's like such a disgusting and fascinating performance um you know and he's changed quite a bit from the book he's

not like the the kind of pedophile that you have there so much. He still kisses Feyd-Rautha at one point. They have an interesting relationship there. But yeah, and I've just been watching the interviews with Stellan Skarsgård as well. I just loved him. I think he's so fantastic.

But yeah. I love him in the... Oh, he's not in the next one. You'll love him in Children of Doom. Oh, he's back. Oh, one. You'll love him in children of doom. Oh, he's better. Oh, okay. Okay. Good to know. I see. I haven't read, I've read the first two. I haven't read past that. So yeah. Well, Brian, Ed, really fantastic to speak with you about all of this, to dig into it,

to talk about the film that I'm kind of in love with and we'll see another few times. And yeah, to talk about how it relates to the things that are going on right now. Of course, you know, Ed Ongwezo Jr. is a tech writer and co-host of the This Machine Kills podcast that you can check out. Brian Merchant, of course, also a tech journalist and writes a newsletter called Blood in the Machine, is also the author of the book of the same name, which is The History of the Luddites, that you will want to certainly check out. It's over here on my shelf. I should have taken it off

so I could like hold it up and show people. Fantastic book, Blood in the Machine, highly recommend. And of course, you know, if you're not a listener of Tech Won't Save Us already, make sure to go to your podcast platform of choice, check it out where we have critical conversations about technology all the time. You can, of course, also support the show on Patreon

if you're not already a supporter. We have a bunch of premium episodes digging into Elon Musk and his kind of impact on the world. I'll also send you some stickers if you support the show. So that's always a cool thing. And just to kind of recap here, I've drank about half of my water of life. I'm really kind of feeling the visions flowing through me now.

You know, I've been converting this poison. So, Ed, you know, we might have to get ready for that battle. Oh, yeah. Let's do our little fight for the cup. Yeah. Awesome. Well, I'll be looking forward to that. I'll bring the hammer.

Yeah, I love it. Yeah. But thanks again, guys. thanks to everyone for watching um it's been fantastic fantastic and we'll have to do another one sometime yeah thank you for having us this was great anytime Thank you.