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Olivia Rodrigo, the Unraveled Sewer Live across
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North America with special guests.
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Get tickets Thursday, May 7th at oliviarodrigo.com.
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Foreign.
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Welcome to the Compact Podcast. Today we'll discuss redistricting in Virginia, the Palantir manifesto, and a ban on phones in schools. I'm joined by Ashley Frawley and Jeff Schillenberger. And I'm Matthew Schmitz. So when redistricting is leading the news, either it's a slow news day or there's something significant about the redistricting. Which one is it? In this case,
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probably mostly a slow news day. It seems to be just people are getting excited for the midterms and, you know, the media hype cycles around that are starting. So it's, it's a story that, you know, can, can be plugged into that narrative of a, of a, an approaching Democratic wave election. This redistricting vote was not particularly overwhelming, I don't think. I'm, I'm not sure. When I looked at it, it was kind of just over 50% have voted in favor of it. I'm not sure how many votes have been counted at that point. So it looks like it wasn't a, it wasn't a landslide pro redistricting vote. So it seems like, you know, the larger significance of this is just that I will lay the blame here to the extent if we consider it blameworthy, maybe it's just normal politics. You know, I think Trump does definitely deserve the blame for initiating this cycle of attempting to use control of, of state houses to redraw congressional districts. He has pressured Republicans to do this in state houses they control and I believe, you know, about a year ago, a little more started exerting quite a bit of pressure to try to get Republican state legislators to redraw their state houses to benefit the GOP and saw this as a way of avoiding, you know, potentially avoiding a midterm landslide for the Democrats. And the Democrats responded by, in a tit for tat way, you know, trying to tilt the playing field in various states that they control, like California and now Virginia. And, you know, this is, it's pretty banal stuff. I'd say. The, the thing that maybe the things that are noteworthy about it are, first of all, that it, it marks a kind of turn away from a certain, I'd say, kind of prevailing mood for a while that these sorts of, you know, blatant attempts to redraw districts in order to favor your party were kind of vulgar and unpleasant. And, you know, maybe somebody like Mitt Romney on the Republican side or someone like Barack Obama or someone like John McCain. You know, think of the different nominees prior to Trump, and then someone like Obama on the Democratic side might have been in favor of it. And there have been certain initiatives in some states to create these bipartisan districting committees that basically try to, you know, create districts that will enable serious competition and contestation rather than just becoming safe districts for one party. And so I believe Utah, you know, that, that symbol of, of sort of nice guy, good governance Republicanism is, is one state that has this. And I think maybe Trump has sort of complained about this fact that the Utah has these, this sort of bipartisan commission controlling redistricting. I believe Trump attempted to strong arm Indiana into the Indiana legislature into redrawing their districts, and they refused. And so that got him very upset. And it was kind of taken as a, an unusual case a few months ago of, of people within Trump's party kind of going against what he, what he was demanding. So it, it does seem that there, there, there's something going on here that's obviously a kind of return to this much kind of cruder form of politics. You know, when we think of gerrymandering, I can't remember what the origin of that term is, but, you know, it, we associate it with this very kind of corrupt, you know, maybe kind of form of, of machine politics that once prevailed in America. And, you know, it's, it's often seen as like, kind of embarrassing, although there were certain versions of it that were considered acceptable which were essentially a kind of ethnic clientelistic politics where, you know, you sort of give particular ethnic groups like their district. And that's, that's been a staple particularly of sort of the Democratic Party congressional coalition for a long time. And so there were certain carve outs where, like, okay, if you're, I don't know, the, if you're like the one Puerto Rican lawmaker from the New York City area, then, you know, they'll sort of maintain this district for you. That, and I actually lived in a district that was exactly this at one point that there were, it was like this bizarre sort of band that stretched across multiple boroughs. But the rationale for it was simply that it would put all the Puerto Ricans in the same, or, or a large portion of the Puerto Ricans in the same district and thereby kind of give them their own representative. So that's like one version of it that basically survived. But overall, I think it was seen as a bit unseemly. And so the interesting thing is that now We've returned to this moment where both parties are just kind of openly embracing this sort of crude attempt to tilt the playing field in their favor. And that, that does just seem to be, I think you can specifically say, well, Trump kind of kick this current, this current race to the bottom off last year by pressuring Republicans to do this in various states. But at the same time it, it, it is of a piece with the way that he's in some ways kind of revived certain older forms of, of politics that I think we associate with these sort of nastier and kind of cruder, more transactional, more corrupt, and also just more kind of zero sum types of political action that prevailed in earlier periods of American history. And so in that sense, I can't remember the exact period in American history that was called the era of good feelings. So maybe there was some kind of era of good feelings a couple decades ago stretching into maybe the early 2000 and tens where like, you know, there was kind of some sense that like doing this blatant rigging of districts was sort of embarrassing and like a relic of this older, cruder way of doing politics. But I think that, you know, that era of good feelings is over and everybody's happy to be open about just, just kind of blatantly trying to game the system to favor their own party. I guess not everybody because, you know, those Indiana Republic resisted Trump's demands to do this. So, you know, there are still a few sort of suckers out there who believe in fair play and, you know, false ideological phantasms like that, but, you know, only in, only in places like Indiana. So that, you know, the rest of us have gotten with the times and understand that we are living in a time of zero sum partisan contestation. And, and you know, the, the, you've got to bend the rules to favor your, your side.
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Yeah. The term gerrymander comes from, it's a portmanteau. The first part, Jerry, is the last name of Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Jerry. And the last part comes from Salamander because he presided over at the drawing of a congressional district that looked like a salamander. Thus the, the gerrymander was born. Yeah, the elections have consequences. The Virginia Democrats won and they're pushing this through. And you know, the, the law was, or the redistricting was submitted to voters. Voters were less enthusiastic about this law than they were about Democrats winning the state. You know, the law pass, you know, whereas Harris won the state more handily and so did Virginia Democratic Governor Abigail Spanberger. So I think that you know, these things do have consequences. Voters can look at them and say, this is too extreme of a gerrymander, and they can reject it. I do think there will be a kind of ratchet effect. You'll see other Republican states be more aggressive in redistricting now that the Democrats have done this in Virginia. When you draw these very creative congressional districts where you're making it so that there's only one Republican congressman in the state, you are stretching your Democratic votes more thinly across all these districts so your margins are lower, and that will make it easier for those districts to be flipped in a wave election. So there are consequences to this. And, yeah, maybe at some point the Democrats will reject their gerrymander. People are talking about one district. They're calling it the Lobster. The Lobster.
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Well, I can't think of a way that that could possibly be turned into a nice portmanteau. The thing about it is that if you have transformed all of your politics into, like, claiming the moral high ground, and then you do something like this, and they were saying, like, well, what are we supposed to do? We supposed to fight with both hands tied behind our backs? Well, okay, so fight dirty. But now you've undermined your entire politics, so it can't but come back to bite you. And also exposes the limitations of having a politics that's based on kind of like being the nice guys as opposed to the mean Republicans or something like that. Okay, so then you're going to play dirty. But that's your whole politics. It reminds me of, like, somebody asked Clinton once, like, something about, oh, what was that famous line where you. Why would you do these things if it, like, undermines your whole political program? Is like, well, we don't have a political program if we can't get into power. But if your whole political program is, like, having the moral high ground, then, you know, getting into power negates that. Then you've got nothing. Anyway, it's a bit silly to me. Silly not doing this. Not just doing this, but silly in the sense of like, what Democratic Democrat politics has become.
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Jeff, you are the expert on tech here at Compact. I don't mean you repair our microphones, but you are. Yeah, really kind of historian and analysts of the tech rights. And we're all looking forward to your forthcoming book, which I don't think we can pre order yet, but we'll let listeners know when that's possible. So what do you make of Palantir's manifesto which is causing so much discussion online?
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Well, it's Second bullet points is one that I can fully get behind, which is we must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Which is funny because my, my wife and I always talk about the tyranny of the apps, which is basically this thing that in order to do anything these days you have to download an app. So like every, I don't know, you go to some little town where you have to park on the street and it happens. There's like a specific app you have to download just in order to pay for parking on Main street in some small town in upstate New York. Maybe that's not the most absurd example, but the point is, yes, I agree, we should rebel against the tyranny of the apps instead of having to use an app for everything. And I don't think everyone and every enterprise should have its own app. So I give my wholehearted, full throated support to that, to that point. So Palantir, it's, I mean it's, it's interesting because this, this whole thing is framed as a summary of the book the Technological Republic, which was published sometime back, I guess about a year ago in 2025, you know, which is authored by Alex Karp, who founded Palantir with Peter, or was, was recruited by Peter thiel to be CEO of Palantir roughly 20 years ago. And then his co author is Nicholas Simiska, who also works for him there. So it's, it's, in a sense, not, it's, it's interesting that it was, it, it made such a splash because it's really just a summary of the argument of the book, which has been out for over a year. So as far as I can tell, the basic agenda and significance of the Technological Republic is worth noting and I think does actually express something real and significant, which is the reconsolidation of an explicit military industrial complex in the heart of Silicon Valley. In other words, that, that Silicon Valley is in various ways both overt and subtle, reorganizing itself as an appendage of the military state once again, which is what it was in its origins back when it was essentially a collection of military contractors and many of its projects were spun off from Defense Department funded projects. So I think the current moment is a little bit different from that because in, in the previous moment, really what you had was the, the massive impetus and funding provided by the Cold War state in response to various challenges it faced in the comp, you know, various kinds of competition with the Soviet Union, you know, incentivizing the, the building of these companies that could could source certain kind of technologies, supply certain kinds of technologies, and then that, that, that again, certain, like Defense Department initiatives could be spun off and sort of handed over to these companies to develop as private initiatives. So I, I think what you have now is a little bit, is a little bit different in that it's really more about the industry itself trying to revisit, reorganize itself and reorient itself so as to find a different modus operandi that will carry it into the future. So I think the, the background, you know, it begins with these kind of scornful remarks. I mean, so here's a, here's an interesting, the very first line in this manifesto, the Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. So this is interesting because it's a repetition of a certain critique that was made of Silicon Valley 10, 20, 30 years ago, which is that it presented itself in libertarian terms as just this kind of spontaneous innovation sort of product of the sort of zany, innovative whims of these, you know, these sort of crazy outsider kind of hacker types, you know, just like inventing stuff in their garages. And so that was kind of the mainstream narrative of where these companies came from. And so critics often on the left would sort of point out, well, that's not really true. In fact, you know, basically this whole industry was really incubated by the Cold War military industrial complex and the state, and much of what it's doing is spun off from various kinds of state funded initiatives. So here you have Palantir openly embracing this point, which was often again made critically about the previous sort of ideological legitimation narrative of the industry. And instead Palantir is openly embracing this and said, yes, we owe a moral debt to the state. We were built by the state. This industry is an offshoot of the state's national security projects. So that's a real reorientation of the, of the, the legitimation narrative. Is it better or worse? And this is kind of an interesting question for like critics of Silicon Valley. Is it better or worse for Silicon Valley to conceal its origins as part of the, the military industrial complex or to embrace, to openly embrace and avow those origins? Because I think that's sort of the, the, you know, and you can sort of say this is a, you know, people described it as a super villain manifesto and it's like, okay, well, you can say this is villainous. And, but I'm genuinely curious. Like, I don't, I don't necessarily have a good answer myself, but should we think this is better or worse for this industry to avow these origins and to explicitly articulate its own legitimation narrative in these terms? I'm not sure, but it's a, it's a question worth asking. So let me just move on to a second point, which is, you know, this point about the tyranny of the apps that I joked about. Is the iPhone our greatest creative, if not crown, achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may, may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible. So again, here there's kind of an embrace of certain critiques of the culture that, and, and the sort of model of innovation that was promoted by Silicon Valley for a long time. You know, is this stuff actually really improving our lives or is it just kind of cluttering it up with, with meaningless distractions? So again, this is a kind of a case of a major player within the industry kind of embracing what were once maybe outsider critiques of the industry. So one thing that I think is worth noting here is that the whole economic basis of the tech boom of the 2010s was this zero interest policy, zero interest rate policy, ZIRP for short model, where, you know, essentially the Federal Reserve's monetary policies after the 2008 crash, it created this massive and constant influx of investor money into venture capital firms, which is then poured into all of these startups and, you know, essentially kind of kept the industry afloat throughout the 2000 and tens. And so this really is the business model of that era. And that they gave us not the iPhone itself, but all of the software built on top of the iPhone. I mean, gave us essentially the tyranny of the apps, as they call it. So the question is, Why does this from Palantir's perspective today look like something to kind of lament or, you know, like the model of tech that came out of this era is something that they're kind of openly renouncing and rejecting. One, in some sense, they don't really have a choice because the end of ZIRP around 2022 essentially ended that entire business model for the tech industry. And that meant that it had to reimagine itself and rediscover its, its vocation and the way that it would, you know, pursue profitability and some kind of sustainable model going into the future. And so one, you know, there are a few different ways actors within the industry have attempted to do this, but one is, is what I said at the beginning is to essentially reconstitute itself as part of this new military industrial complex which can be particularly, you know, justified in relation to the idea of a new cold war with China and a sort of AI arms race. You know, they, the Palantir manifesto explicitly says, you know, we're moving from the age of essentially atomic rivalry to AI rivalry. So geopolitics is redefined as AI competition. And so I think the significance of Karp's book and this manifesto is really just to lay out this new legitimation narrative for the industry which is also connected to a new business model for it, which is to define itself in relation to the state essentially as a collection of state contractors whose innovation serves the purpose of attempting to assert, you know, or reassert and re. Establish geopolitical primacy in these new conditions. So that's, I don't know, I mean that's really what's going on here. It seems relatively explicit to me. And I suppose the question, you know, I think people really, you know, and perhaps Palantir itself is kind of, it's another way to think about this is it's the inversion of the don't be evil marketing moment of Google, right where you know, and which, which was very much of the ZIRP era where, where, you know, essentially the money is so free flowing and is flowing into these entities that can essentially look as if they're, you know, giving away their services for free. Of course they're, they're building up sophisticated advertising models behind that, but they can look essentially like charitable operations and, and you know, like they're not ultimately driven by profit. And so that is why Google can define itself as, as don't be evil. It's a product of these very specific monetary circumstances. You know, it seems that Palantir is sort of explicitly inverting that and saying, oh yes, let's, let's be evil. In other words, let's, let's sound sort of like a supervillain. And I think there are various ways we can connect this to the current moment politically. But at the same time I think it's worth noting this company goes back to the post 911 era. It was founded around 2004 and it was essentially spun off from PayPal's anti fraud, you know, sort of procedures and algorithms that were developed to detect patterns of fraud in PayPal transactions. And you know, this company has existed throughout this time. It was originally really a war on terror project. And so it, it always kind of revealed this alternative vocation of the tech industry which was this continued association with you know, these sort of geopolitical projects of the state and that, that never went away. Of course Google even, you know, don't be evil, Google was, was closely involved in various kinds of state initiatives. You know, of course we had the Snowden revelations that revealed the way the tech companies were cooperating with, with state and intelligence. And so this whole alternative project for the tech industry never went away. It's just that this particular narrative wasn't foregrounded and wasn't made explicit and wasn't at the center of how the industry understood itself. So now we're seeing this shift and I think people don't quite know what to do about it because it's one of these things where you could sort of say aha. Well Google says don't be evil, but actually they're cooperating with the nsa. But when the, when the explicit gambit of the industry is to say yes, we are part of the military industrial complex, that whole kind of unmasking procedure doesn't work anymore. And so people are just kind of shocked by it. But I just, I guess my overall take is that we shouldn't really be shocked by it because it's, it's just bringing out into the open a logic that never really disappeared and was always, was always present.
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C
There's, yeah, there's so much in this manifesto it's like tempting to kind of like go through point by point like oh yeah, and then on this point I can try to avoid doing that. But there were a few that, you know this I, which one of the psychologization of politics. I find that so interesting because I happen to be working on that right now and I would do, because I've been working that for 20 years. But like it's interesting that they should name specifically as one of their manifesto points, the psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. And there's a kind of veiled reference to left ish kind of people. So those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life, find expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed. So it's like sort of criticizing the therapeutic, the pseudo therapeutic politics of the left where they're looking for salvation through, through politics through this sort of like moral do gooding and this kind of thing and sort of calling that out and at the same time doing this kind of lay bare, we will lay bare the extraordinary power that we actually have and not pretend like Google to be doing any good. But the thing is, that's interesting, is that across the political spectrum there's an enormous blind spot for the psychologization of politics. Everybody is on the pop psychology bandwagon to the point that I read a piece recently that went into, went to great lengths to talk about the replication crisis and then blamed sociology for it. Like, could not even. No, that was psychology. It was. Psychology is going through replication crisis. But like, people can't even accept it. They're so wedded to the physics envy of psychology, they need it so badly across the political spectrum to lend some kind of pseudoscientific power to their ideas. No, I'm right, because my ideas are rooted in human nature. See, look, this crappy study done on 133 university students in America proves it, you know, and then it's never been replicated, but we forgot about that. So I find that very interesting. And I think that actually the next kind of area that ought to be on the political agenda of our culture war is the misuse of psychology and just how deeply ingrained the therapeutic ethos is across the political spectrum. How much everyone is using so called psychology. And we're using psychology to solve economic questions. We're using psychology just like we have deep, deep problems in society. And everyone is like, absolutely certain that the answer's got to be psychological in some way. I was just at a conference a few weeks ago and I was sitting next to a lovely gentleman who halfway through the conversation I realized who he was and that I had criticized him quite heavily in my books. But he was sort of trying to rehash this old idea of like, well, we shouldn't be so interested in GDP anymore. I think we should search for. And he didn't say happiness this time because he was smart. He's like, oh, that's 10, 15 years ago. Meaning. We should be searching for meaning. And I was like, you can't solve this problem of stagnating GDP by begging people to look the opposite direction. It's a real material problem. And they're that. But that's what they've been trying to do. Like you go back to the 19th century. Yeah, back to the early 19th century, economists, political economists were noticing, oh gosh, this is going to be a problem. Like we're going to have stagnation in the long term, like pretty serious stagnation. And they're like, oh, well, you know, it's a few hundred years in the future, it's no reason to worry about it. And then some, and then some, like John Stuart Mill Were like, oh well, you know what, maybe it'll be fine. Maybe we'll just like shift our values or something like that. It's not a problem that you can just shift your values away from. But that's kind of been the trajectory that we've been dealing with. We just, we have no idea how to deal with these, this long term stagnation that we seem to be feeling. That fact that our societies appear to be stuck and are growing, are not growing at as fast a rate as they were and that they need to in order to be healthy. And it's like, well, we haven't got any solutions for that. So let's just like hope that everybody can feel nice in some other way. Maybe we could just ignore it and it'll be fine. So I found that very interesting because I don't even think they recognize the degree to which a psychologization of politics has drilled down to the core of all of our politics. And getting away from that is the core to actually moving forward, I think, is to start to realize that if we have material problems, they have to be dealt with on a material plane. And you cannot simply, we can't solve this through, you know, hoping that we can shift our economies toward well being or meaningful lives or something like that. At the end of the day, something has to give. Nobody invests except to receive a return on investment. And if you're not going to get a return on investment through, you know, socially useful means, then you will invest in, oh, I don't know, Palantir's new AI death robots. If you believe Yanis Varys Facus's response to this, oh, we have AI death robots are on, are on the way, basically what he said. So the if, sorry, I'm going on, but if I could just point to another one of these topics that absolutely jumped out at me and that was the 12th point. He says the atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence. The atomic, atomic age is ending and a new era of determinants built on AI is set to begin. I have been noticing this for a long time. I've wanted to write about it and I have done a ton of reading around. I still don't feel confident to do so, but I think this is exactly right and extraordinarily, and of course it would be prescient because Palantir wants to be at the forefront of this. The connected to what I just talked about. We have an issue of slow growth, sluggish growth. Nobody invests, as I said, except to receive return on investment. We have a situation where let's say like we're, we're kind of in a city and there are tons and tons of taxis in this city and each taxi therefore isn't making as much money. Wouldn't it be great if you taxi business were connected to the state and could, you know, maybe get rid of some of those taxis? Maybe you could do it through regulations that you might be able to survive, probably will survive. Or perhaps they could, you could point out that those other taxi drivers are actually a real danger to the good people of New York City and they should be blotted out somehow. I don't know, maybe they're, they're actually threatening our lives and they should be shot on site. I don't know. And now the remaining taxi drivers can be quite profitable. That's kind of the situation we're in at a global level at the moment. And the trouble is that if you start to blow up your taxi drivers, let's say in Iran, it's a terrible example taxi drivers because now I'm into like stereotypes. But let's say you, you go and you, you blow them up. You are risking, you have now risked mutually assured destruction. You know, their allies are going to destroy you and, but that is how we've kind of managed to maintain peace for such a long time. But if you really, you're going to go out of business, you really need to make this profit. You know, you know you, you, you're going to want to risk that. And this is what we've been doing. We've been like ratcheting that, brushing up. Maybe I'll just do it. Russia has like run like a thousand different programs, not programs. What am I trying to say? They've like done all these little run throughs. Of course everybody has of like how could we like maybe destroy like a little bit just enough like and not get this retaliation. And what I have been saying is that we are going to see the age of digital warfare expand massively. Massively. We're going to see controlled disruption as opposed to mutually assured destruction, as opposed to physical destruction because it is just too risky to physically destroy your opponents. You can have plausible deniability through, you know, a state can sponsor a non state actor to engage in cyber warfare and disable your opponents and just enough that you put them out of business and you make yourself more profitable as a result. And you can have much more controlled destruction that way or wipe out entire areas of infrastructure to make room for, to make it more profitable to build New infrastructure. So this is likely what's going to happen because it's a lot more clandestine and it is a lot safer. So it's, it's like, it's, this is how we've, how things have been going for a long time I think is that capital destruction has been slow, much slower, as opposed to like a world war. You just smash, you just flatten two continents and build them again and produce a boom for 20 years. What we are seeing is very slow destruction, very controlled destruction in a few different places. I'm sure you've heard this story before in relation to Covid. Covid is, was like opportunistically used to destroy weaker capitals. And then, you know, the ones that remain can be more profitable, can also buy up some of the, their, their capital cheap, more cheaply raise the profit rate that way. It's not enough. But we're going to see more and more and more of this. So watch, watch. You're going to have more and more outages. You're going to have planes that aren't going to be taking off. And it'll just be like the background, it'll just be the background of our lives. And this is basically what they're saying. They know this. They're saying, yeah, that that's what's going to happen from now on. And we want to be at the forefront of it. We're going to be the ones doing it. So they've realized where the new, where the really new profitable weaponry is. And if you are smart, you will get on board with them.
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A
Ashley, are you for or against the ban on phones in British schools? I gather the law, a law is being brought in. So it's not just schools banning the phones. Right. But the, the government will say no phones in schools.
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C
Yeah. So that's. So the government wants to, they've made statements to the effect of like, supporting in spirit a ban on phones in schools. But now they're moving to do that in law. So they want to bring in a legal ban on smartphones in schools in England. And this would be through an amendment to the Children's and Children's well being in Schools bill, which would create a clear legal requirement for schools. But it would essentially, this is what most schools do in practice is they have something like either you come into the school and the phones get locked up or you, or it's like they're away and never seen. So you're not, you would never see a phone on the, on the school, on the school ground, something like that. But essentially most schools have something like this already in practice, and it just kind of gives it some kind of legal force. I don't think that this is a good idea. I know that. I know that everybody loves to talk about the unique danger that mobile phones have for our poor dear young children. And I have talked a lot about how children are being used as a way to have more identifiers on the Internet, so less anonymous posting, more posting that's directly connected to your identity under the guise of like protecting children. So you have to go in if you want to go on Reddit or something like that. You have to show your ID to access certain content, this sort of thing. Now obviously I think that phones are powerful and they can be dangerous like anything. But it is extremely important for young people, for adults, for anybody to develop forms of self control around these things. And outright bands don't do that. They, they don't. I am, I'm pretty well, you know, it's funny, I've changed my mind about some of these things, so I have to be careful. I have been firmly against the idea of bans, for instance, around alcohol. I think it's much better to have vices integrated up to a certain point, you know, beyond like hard drugs or whatever vices integrated into everyday life through which you can develop sufficient self control. So I think that the, the most important thing is that families need to decide where is this phone? Where is this device in your life? And children need to be able to get off of it themselves. And that is the most important thing. You cannot have an external rule that says get off of it. And you have to figure out a way to, to develop that within your own, within your own family. Now there's a whole other kind of like side discourse about the fact that we've populated young people, children and young people's lives with so much risk, so much risk that they're like, oh, lazy parents, putting your kids in front of phones all day, blah, blah, blah. Well, I'm sorry, but you're remembering a 1950s that never existed with like moms sitting on the floor playing blocks with their kids. No, kids were outside playing. Kids did not spend that much time inside their houses. You didn't spend that much time with adults. You're putting them in front of screens because you populated the outside world with too much risk. And now the screens are yet another risk. And so it's like, you know, no one will be happy until you're sat on top of your kid 24, 7. And then, even then they'll be mad because you're helicoptering them. So like parents can't do right for doing wrong. But my, my advice would be you've just got to find a way within your own family to integrate these devices to teach when is the time to use them and when it's not just to give an example. In my house, you know Greeks, they rest between 3 and 5pm then they go back to work at 5pm so you can use your screens between 3 and 5pm, you can watch TV, whatever. But other times we don't use them and they have to get off them naturally without me telling them or else they cannot use it the next day. So my kids know when it's okay to use screens and they know when they have to get off of them and I don't tell them that myself. And they're fantastic about getting off these things because they really want to get on them the next day time. So that's just my advice. I don't think bands are a good idea because they take it out of our hands to decide for ourselves and ultimately to socialize our children to decide for themselves.
- [41:40]
A
Yep. I just have American intuitions on this kind of government wide ban. Seems a little sweeping. I mean surely schools can keep it out. I'm for banning other things, you know, online gaming, things like that. You know, I'm sympathetic to, to restrictions on online smut. I think some things you do need a kind of broad society wide net to catch. But surely you know, phones and schools can be done at a more kind of local case by case way. That's my, that's my inter American showing. I'm sure Jeff, you know, who's less of a real American than I am, feels differently you favor this heavy handed governmental action.
- [42:32]
B
I mean I'm okay with it. I had sort of a theory cell take which is that, you know, there's a great essay by Gilles Deleuze on the, called the Postscript on the Societies of Control that compares a model of society described by Foucault where the basic model is that of the enclos. And so a school would be a perfect example of this kind of what Foucault called disciplinary institution. And I mean it's in terms of Ashley's account, you know, sort of anthropology of this, you know, the, the purpose of a, of a disciplinary institution in Foucault's account is to, you know, to a certain extent, you know, is to form a certain type of subject. And so the pro, the basic problem that the smartphone in a school presents is that it breaks through the enclosure that the school has to be, in the terms of Erving Goffman, a total institution. It has to kind of be a microcosm of the entire world that is self enclosed and self contained. And the point of this older model of society is that you move through different institutions of this sort in the course of your life depending on, you know, this could be the military, it's a school, it could be the military, it could be the factory. And these all have the same form which is this again, total institution that is, is a kind of enclosure that makes up a total world in and of itself. And so again, the problem with the, the smartphone is that it breaks through the enclosure and kind of, you know, prevents the, the totalizing force of the institution from manifesting itself. So you know, the basic question here and, and you know, what, what Deleuze suggests is that, and he's writing in the early 90s, but this form is already breaking down then in part through kind of networked communications that, you know, prevented the consolidation of institutions that were, you know, that could be kind of totally controlled within a delimit, you know, highly delimited kind of geographic space and you know, created this, this alternative set of possible modes of control, but which would take into account the possibility of this kind of total mobility and, and lack of any kind of possibility of totalizing enclosure. The simple example that he brings up is the, the idea of a prisoner who instead of being in prison is tagged with a GPS enabled ankle bracelet. And so this is still a kind of imprisonment even though it doesn't require enclosure, you know, enclosure in sort of a specific geographical space. And so I think, you know, this isn't a very good, this isn't a very good sort of yes or no answer in terms of what I would, whether I would condone this. I, I think this is a symptom of the, the crisis of these sorts of institutions that they, they belong to a different sort of technological and, and social era and they now have to coexist with these technologies that are in many ways at odds with and, and in some sense specifically designed to, to break down the geographical concentration on which they depend. And so, you know, I think this is just going to be a crisis that there isn't going to be any particularly satisfying resolution to until the, the, the ultimate fate of these institutions is, is determined in some form or another. So yeah, that's my, my simple answer. I think. I, I'm not, it doesn't caused me, you know, I don't have strong moral objections to the ban, but I don't think that it solves the deeper problem that these institutions have been fundamentally challenged by the new technological era.
- [47:11]
C
I should say that what the point that I was making is that schools were already doing that. They were already recognizing that there was an issue. And you know, I fair play to you, I, I recognize what you're saying there. But just to, to clarify that what I was getting at is that people are, we're all, by analogy, people in their homes were also already trying to deal with this. Like people are already incredibly guilt ridden about the fact that they simply. There's not enough time in the world to do all the things that they're supposed to do and also not do all the things that they're supposed to do lest they helicopter their children, this sort of thing. And my worry is that these bands feed into this notion that no one ever does anything unless the state tells them to, which is. Which also risks become a self becoming a self fulfilling prophecy. Because then it's like, well, the state, you know, you're invited to then say, well, the state hasn't said no. So then the answer must be yes, which I think not. You know, most people are reflective and don't do that. But I just, I don't like this idea of like, there's no point for a ban. Most of the schools are already doing it. And you're basically saying like, okay, now we have this band, now we know how to act and how to behave. And I find that to be extraordinarily patronizing and potentially disempowering.
- [48:29]
A
Thanks to Jeff and Ashley. Thank you listeners. For more go to compactmag.com subscribe.
- [48:45]
C
Sam.