Fred Turner on Countercultures, Cybercultures, and Californian and Texan Ideologies

Summary

New Books Network: Fred Turner on Countercultures, Cybercultures, and Californian and Texan Ideologies

Date: February 25, 2026
Podcast: Peoples and Things (New Books Network)
Host: Lee Vinsel & guest co-host Paula Bialski
Guest: Fred Turner, Professor of Communication at Stanford

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep with Fred Turner, renowned for his foundational book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, on the intellectual and cultural currents connecting 1960s Californian countercultural movements to today’s Silicon Valley and emerging Texan tech ideologies. The conversation covers:

• How utopian dreams and technophilia intermingled historically and today
• The evolution and mythologies of Silicon Valley culture
• The roots and dangers of right-wing techno-ideologies in the tech world, including “Dark Enlightenment” thinkers like Curtis Yarvin
• Social anxieties, power, and marginalization within the Valley
• Fred Turner's reflections on his methods, legacy, and upcoming projects

The hosts and guest maintain an engaging, thoughtful, and candid tone, accessible for academic and general listeners alike.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Setting the Stage: Academia, Parenthood, and "Good Enoughness"

• [00:46] Co-host Paula Bialski shares her personal and academic journey, connecting her work on “good enough software” to parenting and contemporary debates on AI/LLMs in the workplace.
  • She discusses her research proposal “GEAR,” which uses the “good enoughness” lens to analyze generative AI at work:

    "Much of the current debates around AI and LLMs are filled with speculation, technical misunderstandings, hype, or moral panic. GEAR takes a different approach. It treats generative AI not as an abstract threat or technological promise, but as a concrete workplace tool whose effects can only be understood by observing how professionals actually use, contest and learn from it in practice." (Paula, 03:21)

  • Lee Vinsel highlights the role of “taste” (as opposed to “vibe coding”) in determining what counts as “good enough" and who gets to decide.

    "You have to have taste to know what good and what good enough is. But how do you get taste? And we know these tools are mostly helping people who already know a lot." (Lee, 06:53)

Introducing Fred Turner and His Work

• [09:35, 15:16] Paula and Lee discuss Fred Turner's dual identity as a scholar and musician, praising his generosity and influence.
• Fred is lauded for his work tracing how 1960s countercultural ideals became embedded in Silicon Valley, shaping its culture and ideologies, especially in From Counterculture to Cyberculture (C2C).

  "How the dreams of the 1960s didn't disappear but helped shape the Silicon Valley." (Paula, 16:07)

• Paula emphasizes the value of finding "sweet people" rather than just big academic names.

Revisiting "From Counterculture to Cyberculture": Origins and Impact

• [17:12] Fred Turner summarizes the purpose of C2C:

  “The book is an effort to try to understand how it was that utopian ideas got associated with and attached to machines that in the 1960s were imagined by most folks as anything but utopian.” (Fred, 17:12)

• He describes Stuart Brand (of the Whole Earth Catalog) as the bridge figure connecting 1960s counterculture with later tech optimism, using events and networks to carry forward the ideology.
• Fred reflects on the influence of his journalism background on his scholarly approach—leading with people and stories rather than abstract ideas:

  "You always lead with people because people want to know about people and ideas follow the people." (Fred, 19:25)

• He consciously avoids discipline-bound jargon to remain accessible and cross-disciplinary.

The Counterculture–Techno-culture Nexus: Myths and Realities

• [29:12] Fred clarifies misconceptions about C2C, noting that the counterculture was never purely "anti-corporate" or "anti-tech":

  “One of the fictions around counterculture to cyber culture is that somehow I told the story of how hippies brought us computers. And that's not actually correct.” (Fred, 29:15)

• He describes the legacy of technocentrism and corporate affinity within the Californian “new communalists.”
• Burning Man is dissected as a manifestation of these values—a project-based, team, tech-centric event that superficially signals communal or countercultural ethos, but, per Fred, actually re-inscribes mainstream American values:

  "In essence, to make Burning man work, you have to build a bunker against the desert and then you can party." (Fred, 34:19) "Burning man was never deeply countercultural… Very white, very wealthy, very plugged in… Not a world that challenged the core values of mainstream America." (Fred, 35:21)

Techno-Authoritarianism: Texas, the “Dark Enlightenment,” and Fear

• [41:48] Fred addresses the rising public profiles and influence of right-wing techno-political thinkers like Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel, warning of an authoritarian "commune logic at scale":

  "I think we're inhabiting a moment where people like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, members of the PayPal mafia, others have taken core ideas and core techniques from what we thought might have been a counterculture...and they're turning those into glosses on ways they want to run the world." (Fred, 42:09) "It's a recipe for authoritarianism." (Fred, 43:23)

• These figures, Fred argues, are less about euphoria or utopian escape and more about control, order, and a darkly technocratic vision.
• Texas Ideology becomes shorthand for an extractive, exploitative, “war of all against all” mode of tech capitalism, contrasted but connected to the Californian mythos.

Silicon Valley Now: Unseen Inequality and Social Fear

• [50:24] Fred discusses his recent book, Seeing Silicon Valley (photo book collaboration with Mary Beth Meehan) and the challenge of making the invisible working class in Silicon Valley visible to the world.

  "I wanted to kind of literally make visible what was here." (Fred, 51:07) "The blindness was so powerful." (Fred on publishers, 54:49)

• The current Valley vibe, he says, is pervasive fear:

  “There’s one word that describes the energy everywhere here in Silicon Valley and all across most of America, and it’s fear. It's fear. We are watching an authoritarian takeover of our state…” (Fred, 56:33) “At the highest levels, among those on the right, opportunity. What is the opportunity, given the new leadership, to continue to profit and to grow our firms?... It scares the heck out of me when I see Elon Musk rummaging through the national databases, trying to knit them together. That looks to me like a straight up effort to build the infrastructure of fascism.” (Fred, 58:57)

• Lee and Fred discuss the terrifying implications of surveillance infrastructures being weaponized by or for authoritarian actors.

AI Optimism, Infrastructure, and Power

• Conversation turns to the “computerization movement” (Susie Yakano & Rob Kling) and hype cycles around AI/LLMs.

  “The utopian claims for AI and the dystopian claims for AI are part of a computerization movement… As a new technology comes into being, a group of actors… will partner with others… and begin to tell stories about the potential of this technology for whatever change.” (Fred, 62:29)

• AI, in Fred’s view, is driven more by capital and institutional self-interest than by actual transformative possibility.

California vs. Texas: Competing Ideologies

• [66:39] Fred previews his forthcoming Baffler essay on “Texas Ideology”:

  "When you think about Texas ideology, you can think about a wildcatting ideology. We're going to go out. The land is ours to take from and explore… It's the war of all against all." (Fred, 66:47) "The California version looks really sweet and hip... But the California model is pretty malevolent as well." (Fred, 68:00)

Reflections on Work, Legacy, and New Projects

• Fred notes the “snowball effect” of his successful books, both empowering and limiting:

  “Books I've done that have been most successful are actually in some ways the most oppressive to me going forward... it threatens to kind of roll me over…” (Fred, 48:01)

• He briefly describes his next major book—tentatively titled City of Desire—on the New York art world of the 70s and 80s, tracing the shift from liberal to identity politics, and cultures of mutual representation and sexual desire.

  "I'm in a book that's very much focused on the New York art world of the 1970s and 80s... what I'm trying to chronicle is that turn from the liberal era to the identity era..." (Fred, 71:07-72:00)

• New research by his student Becca Lewis will tackle the rise of Silicon Valley's political right.

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Notable Quotes

• Fred Turner on counterculture’s limits: "The counterculture, or at least the part of the counterculture that I wrote about… was always already technocentric, was always already in bed with the corporate world, already saw business and technology as the best way to do things as distinct from politics." (29:45)
• On the tech world’s myth of cool: "There's a way in which the book gets tactically misread by folks in the sciences and in the tech world as evidence that they are in fact, as cool as Ken Kesey and his crowd were. What I'm trying to write an account of is how they became legitimate in that way and what they use the book for is to say we're legitimate." (49:09)
• On the present mood in Silicon Valley: "There’s one word that describes the energy everywhere here in Silicon Valley and all across most of America, and it’s fear." (56:33)
• On infrastructure & fascism: "That looks to me like a straight up effort to build the infrastructure of fascism." (58:57)
• On critique of disciplinary silos: “Far more often, what I see people doing is scrabbling after curiosities that just really bother them and trying to figure them out... I work very hard to translate the questions that animate me into plain language that travels across disciplines and to invite people in from all different disciplines.” (24:07)
• On ideology shifts: "The right hates this. And I would argue that one of the things that we're seeing now in the attacks on LGBTQ people, on people of color, the whole anti woke movement, is a delayed response to the thing whose rise I'm trying to chronicle." (73:34)
• Paula Bialski on intellectual community: “Go to sweet people. Like that’s really the most important thing because there’s too many jerks in this world and you have to spend your time with good people and Fred is a very good person, I'd say.” (11:41)

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Segment Timestamps

• 00:00-09:18: Hosts catch up, discuss AI/LLMs at work, research on "good enoughness," and tech labor change.
• 09:18-15:16: Introducing Fred Turner, his scholarship, and personal quirks.
• 15:16-24:07: Turner reflects on Counterculture to Cyberculture, journalism, and cross-disciplinary methods.
• 24:07-29:12: Avoiding jargon; advice for scholars; academia vs. journalism.
• 29:12-36:18: Counterculture, technophilia, Burning Man, and their hidden mainstream/corporate logic.
• 41:48-48:01: Dark Enlightenment, right populism & tech, media attention, authoritarian infrastructure.
• 50:24-56:33: Seeing Silicon Valley, making invisible inequality visible, Valley’s mood (“fear”).
• 56:33-66:39: Discussion of AI, social infrastructure, working class, organizational power.
• 66:39-74:14: Texas vs. California ideologies, new projects: right-wing Silicon Valley, New York art world, cultural politics.
• 74:14-end: Closing thanks and podcast credits.

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Memorable Moments

• [14:00] Paula improvises a dulcimer “hippie song” in honor of Fred Turner’s musical side.
• [36:18] Fred draws a provocative parallel between Burning Man’s need for a "bunker" and the prepper ethos among Silicon Valley’s elite.
• [49:08] Fred describes being amused and frustrated by scientists misreading his C2C book to confirm their own coolness.
• [55:31] Fred recounting the “blindness” of American publishers to real Silicon Valley—wanting only Mark Zuckerberg-type stories, not working-class realities.

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Summary

Fred Turner's work uncovers how the promises and paradoxes of 1960s counterculture fused with Cold War technocracy to give rise to Silicon Valley's utopian (and increasingly dystopian) logics. In this episode, Turner, with candor and depth, explores how the cultural DNA of both California and Texas continues to shape not just tech, but American identity, power, and politics—and why the stories we tell about technology matter as much as the code itself.

Recommended for:
Anyone curious about the social and cultural history of technology, the politics of Silicon Valley, the roots of current tech ideologies, and the complex interplay between counterculture, capitalism, and power.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[B]

Welcome to Peoples and Things, where we explore human life with technology. I'm Lee Vincel. Hey, everybody. I wanted to welcome my buddy Paula Bialski, who is an associate professor for digital sociology at the University of St. Gallen in St. Gallen, Switzerland, back as a guest host for this episode. Paula, how are you doing, buddy?

[C]

Yo. I'm good. I'm good. I'm staying alive.

[B]

Good.

[C]

Staying alive.

[B]

We recorded this Fred Turner interview almost a year ago in April. So between weird stuff happening on the production side and life, we're just getting to it now.

[C]

And I thought I was gonna, like, pop out my baby right as we were recording. That's why I was gone.

[B]

Right. I was gonna say you. You have a couple new projects in the. In your life, and one of them is an infant child. So when did. When did. When was the baby born?

[C]

Right after the podcast, Lee.

[B]

That's what I thought.

[C]

I was like, contractions do not express my contractions.

[B]

What's the baby's name?

[C]

Rudy.

[B]

Rudy.

[C]

His name is Lee Vinzel.

[B]

Oh, that would be a little weird.

[A]

All right.

[C]

Sorry. I'm not that weird. Yeah, yeah, no, he was born in early June, so it wasn't that far off. It was like a month later. Yeah, yeah. And that was. Yeah, it's academia plus motherhood. That's not our fatherhood. That are. Yeah, adulthood.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

It's a lot.

[B]

Well, you know, you. You wrote this book on, like, good enough software, but you were. You pointed out in that interview that the idea originally came from, like, parenting stuff. Right? Like, good enough parent parenting.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. That's what I'm living. Living the life.

[B]

I don't know how to do anything else.

[C]

Actually, I read about myself.

[A]

Exactly.

[C]

Yeah. Yeah. Once you have two kids, everyone says that it's a cliche, but you just. Yeah. You have to do good enough. You can't just be, like, perfect always.

[B]

Oh, my God.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's what happened. And then. Yeah. And I. I've been thinking a lot about LLMs and also work and tech work and also our work in academia. Just generally labor and what changes in especially science and technology professions with how we use this stuff, you know, and it's really changing how we think, how our students think, how our knowledge is produced and. Yeah, yeah.

[B]

Well, I was. You sent me over this cool research proposal that you've submitted, and it's called gear. And so you're looking at generative AI in the workplace. And I love. I mean, I love a lot of things about this, but I thought I would read a little bit of it for the people.

[C]

I hope. Are you my reviewer for this? I still don't get it yet.

[B]

That would be lucky because I would just say give her the money. So it says this is from your introduction. It says much of the current debates around AI and LLMs are filled with speculation, technical misunderstandings, hype, or moral panic. Gear takes a different approach. It treats generative AI not as an abstract threat or technological promise, but as a concrete workplace tool whose effects can only be understood by observing how professionals actually use, contest and learn from it in practice. Using the lens of good enoughness and adequacy to do stuff. I just love that. That's perfect.

[C]

Oh, thanks, Lee.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And now we need to like indoctrinate this into my reviewers. Yeah. No, no, but it's like, how do we look at this? This. Everyone's like, oh, this is changing jobs. This is going to replace jobs. But we, and I think with this specific grant, you had to like, kind of consolidate what you've been doing and just like build on stuff. So that's why I'm using this framework of adequacy and good enoughness. But yeah, we all, if people are out there and starting to think of researching this. Yeah. You just, you need a lens to this because it's so all encompassing and taking over so many corners of our, our social world. Right. That's what I would say. Yeah.

[B]

And I think the good enoughness lens is really fruitful for this line of inquiry because, I mean, there's all this talk about like AI slop and stuff. Right. Like that, that this, that these tools just like make stuff that's mediocre and crappy. Which is true enough in my experience. You know, so the question is, where is that kind of mediocrity? Okay. Actually. Right. And then I think it raises a lot of interesting questions about power and in interpersonal relationships in the workplace. Like, and maybe I think it's good enough to send you, me something that's mediocre. But if I'm sending it up to my boss and I'm trying to move up the ladder, maybe I do something different. Right.

[C]

Yeah. And how does it, like a junior, a new intern who's 21 years old, know what's good enough? That's also another question. Right. Like, how do they discern where is their. What is happening to professional. Know how your professional vision to understand. Yeah. Your, your workplace. Yeah. Knowledge. What happens to that? And that's also, I find really interesting how it gets transformed and learned in practice.

[B]

Yeah. And I think I was talking to this guy who I know from, from this meditation spirituality course I'm in right now. I'm in like this really intensive like eight month course that ends with a retreat. Anyway, I know him from that and he's.

[C]

Can I just interrupt? You always know these guys from like random like circles. And like, didn't you know, you always name drop your like dad circ circles, your, your campfire circles. I love it. I love it. You're.

[B]

Well, that's where you learn about shit, right? I mean, you know, you got to bring it in.

[C]

Sorry. Go for it.

[B]

So he's, you know, he was just talking to me about. He started up. He left industry because he didn't like the corporate setting and people telling him what to do. And he started up this new company that's all AI based but. And uses LLMs like a mofo. And it seems to be working for him right now. But one of the things he was telling me is that he's a software developer, so he's using it for that those ends. And he was saying the hot new word in his software development.

[C]

I can guess. I guess. You want me to guess? Vibe coding.

[B]

No, no, it's not. Well, I mean it's related, but it's actually more. It's taste.

[C]

Ooh.

[A]

Ooh.

[B]

And I think which is really interesting from a kind of like Pierre Bourdieu, like sociological, like so like if you think about good enoughness, right. Like you have to have taste to know what good and what good enough is. But how do you get taste? And we know these tools are mostly helping people who already know a lot. They're experts. Right. And so they could make those calls.

[C]

Totally.

[B]

Right.

[C]

Thousand percent.

[B]

Wow.

[C]

Very interesting. I'm gonna write that down.

[B]

Yeah. Anyway, I'm really excited about your project. I hope they give you money.

[C]

I'm really excited about your project as well as well. And congrats on finishing your book, Lee.

[B]

Since Project or proposal?

[C]

The good history of shit jobs. I can't wait. I really can't wait because it's. I'm gonna. Yeah. It's also something that I need to look at. And the good history of shit jobs is also something that is also happening now with LLMs. There's gonna be more jobs. The shittiness is going to accelerate in some ways. No.

[B]

Yeah. In some fields probably. That's true. Yeah.

[C]

Yeah. And what's the. Where are you at? Is it coming out soon?

[B]

No, no, it's Just like, it took me over two years to, like, get the proposal in shape. I have been doing research on various chapters and writing pieces of it, but we're gonna sell it and then we go from there. So, like, the way it works is we'll hopefully sell this thing within the next couple months, and then I'll have two years after that to write a book.

[C]

All right, so line up, publishers, line up, please. You got to leave this phone.

[B]

And the other thing I want to tell you about, because it includes you. And I wanted to let listeners know. So we've gone. I think that Peoples and Things is going to be a monthly kind of magazine. Deep Dive Deep Interviews. We're starting a new show, Related. They're all kind of under the same banner, stuff I do with Joe, who's oddly on the call with me and you right now, but being silent because we usually do this

[C]

watching a Netflix show while we're.

[B]

Yeah, so it's just called how to Think about Technology. We're going to cover news. So it's going to be a weekly live stream that'll also be an audio podcast. And I'll start riffing on news probably in the beginning and then probably sometimes have multiple guests on for like, 20. It'll be more like a talk show than a deep dive. And I'm hoping that you'll be on a lot. I'm hoping there'll be, like, the Paula's Corner where you get to just riff and. Yeah.

[C]

Can I play? Can I play an instrument?

[B]

You can, absolutely. Can we jam? Like, yeah, that would be sweet.

[C]

It'll just be like 20 minutes, like 10 minutes of your. Just like, tech news and then 20 minutes of like a free for all jam.

[B]

Exactly.

[C]

That's where now I want to segue to Fred Turner because he plays the Appalachian Dulcimer. Fred Turner, the wonderful communication media studies scholar, plays the weirdest instrument called the Appalachian dulcimer. And if you don't know what that is, go check your chat.

[B]

This is the one. Like a lap. It's a lap thing, right, that you play with a dowel rod.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And interesting. I think there's something I. I just love when you find out that your favorite scholars are also, like, extreme hippies. Maybe they had, like, weird side. I wouldn't say weird. Come on. We're all weird. Like, I just love the side. Side lives of our. Our fun scholars that we love so well. And Fred is one of them. And I met him a long time ago when the University of Luna Berg Still a postdoc. And he came as a fellow to the University of Luna. And yeah, he was like, by the way, you're a musician. Guess what? I play this cool instrument. I'm like, is it cool?

[B]

Exactly. No, I really thought that was cool when, you know, like this was 10 years ago. That's amazing. I mean. So, yeah, I mean, I think that's a perfect setup. So Fred is the Harry and Norman Chandler professor of Communication at Stanford University. And most famously, he's written several books. But most famously, he wrote this kind of now classic book From Counterculture to Cyber Culture. And I think you're setting it up as like he is hippie. Ish. At least is like a nice setup because that's kind of the story of that book at least. Right. Is how kind of like some Silicon Valley culture and way of doing things ideas came out of that 60s counterculture movement.

[C]

Exactly, exactly. And yeah, and he's a very giving scholar. I think that that's not always the case. And you'll hear from this interview. I think that he's just a very kind person and really inquisitive of people and things.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

Dream drop.

[B]

Sweet. My God, he's just. The vibe of this guy is incredibly sweet.

[C]

Exactly, exactly. And I think that's the people we gravitate towards. And I would suggest that to any, like junior scholar, if you're out there and you're listening and you're thinking of doing a PhD, like SCRE. The big names. I mean, Fred is a big name and sweet. But just go to sweet people, like that's really the most important thing because there's too many jerks in this world and you have to spend your time with good people and. And Fred is a very good person, I'd say. Yeah.

[B]

Amen. I remember another reason I wanted to talk to him or what something we talked to him about is because it's just amazing how much. How things have moved over the last year and how much has happened in the last year. But we recorded this interview at a time where it was like early Trump administration. Elon Musk was doging it and had this very major role in the administration that he doesn't really have now. And there was also all this talk of these Silicon Valley people moving to Texas. And so I think Fred, his piece on this might be out. If it's out, I'll put it in the show notes. But he was working on a piece about, you know, like the Silicon Valley ideology versus the Texas ideology. So I remember that was one Thing we wanted to talk to him about is like, where is this stuff at now?

[C]

Yeah, it's true. And he also kind of, I think, looked, you know, there's this piece that he wrote about Burning man at Google, about the cultural infrastructure as new media, and this was written in 2009. And he still was like, red flagging, you know, all the tech CEOs, like, these guys are weird. Everyone.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And like they're. They also are trying. Yeah, they're, you know, trying to work on this. Notions of communal living and technology in weird ways. And we know, like, it goes wrong. And. Yeah. There I find his work always is, like, on the pulse of something very interesting that's about to come. Yeah, yeah.

[B]

And just to tie it one this, I think all of our conversations with folks are really about intellectual community and being together and stuff. And just to do. And what. You know, and one example is I think that Fred's interview works really well with Biella Coleman's interview that we also did together, because Biella has been really exploring the multiple vibes and ideologies and kinds of thought going on in hacking culture that it's not this monolithic thing. Right. And I think our conversation with Fred fits with that really well, too.

[C]

Yep.

[B]

Awesome.

[C]

Yeah. Enjoy. Enjoy, listeners.

[B]

I know, I know. Can you give that. Can you give the people a. Hey, give it. Get excited. Can you try?

[C]

All right. In a song. In a dulcimer song. In a hippie song. Hey, everyone, get excited. It's time to listen to Fred Turner.

[B]

Beautiful. That was great.

[C]

I wanted dulcimer to come in. Joe, it's now you have to pull a dulcimer on top of that.

[B]

I want.

[C]

I want a dulcimer. All right, foreign.

[B]

Welcome to Peoples and Things, a podcast about human life with technology. I'm Lee Vincel, an associate professor of science technology and science society at Virginia Tech. My guest host today again is Paula Bialski, associate professor for Digital sociology at the University of St. Gallen in St. Gallen, Switzerland. And today we'll be talking to the esteemed Fred Turner, Harry and Norman Chandler, professor of communication at Stanford University, author of several books that we'll be talking to him about. Fred, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us today.

[C]

Yay, Lee.

[A]

Paula, thanks for having me. I feel lucky to be here.

[C]

Yeah, wonderful. Thanks.

[B]

Yeah. Paula, when you and I were talking about who we should kind of co interview together, one of the first people that came up was Fred, so.

[C]

Exactly.

[B]

Tell us about why you thought of that.

[C]

I think our listeners in the next hour will notice that you're just such a giving and kind person. And I just, I think that's like for me the number one step to who I want to talk to and who I want to listen to, I guess. But I think also from an academic point of view, I think I speak for a lot of people that you're one of those scholars whose work just keeps echoing back to us if we study digital cultures. And your book From Counterculture to Cyberculture has been for me foundational for how we understand the kind of cultural, ideological roots of the tech world. How the dreams of the 1960s didn't disappear but helped shape the Silicon Valley. But I also find myself returning back to my research in on software engineers, on my research on, I don't know, tech bros. And current also political situation. Because what strikes me most and still does, is how ideology is always kind of baked into the technologies we'll build. And we're going to talk about that during our interview. So I think, Fred, we're really thrilled to talk to you today and to visit some of these ideas, I guess almost 20 years after the book came out. So this is almost an anniversary.

[B]

Yeah, we noticed that.

[A]

But you're dating me now.

[C]

Yeah, but it's good, it's coming back. It's like retro vintage.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Fred, to kind of celebrate the 20th anniversary of this great book, yours. I mean, something I like to do when I kind of have folks of your stature and your career stage on, is to kind of like, if you were to give an elevator pitch from counterculture to cyber culture today, what would you say the book's about and what were you trying to do with it at the time?

[A]

Yeah, so I think the book is an effort to try to understand how it was that utopian ideas got associated with and attached to machines that in the 1960s were imagined by most folks as anything but utopian. And it was a sort of a mystery I was trying to solve. Where the heck did that idea come from? How was that possible? And that's what the book tries to answer. And the book ends up solving the mystery by following Stewart Brand and the wholers catalog crew, a sort of, you know, a group of kind of. I don't know. I always think of Stuart Brand as a kind of P.T. barnum of the counterculture. He was sort of everywhere hosting circus events. He doesn't fly the trapeze, he doesn't, you know, he doesn't ride trick horses, but he hosts everything. And so following the sort of hosting events that he did through time actually gave me just a chain of events and people who carried ideas of the 60s forward into the 80s and 90s. So that became that, that became the how. The mystery started for me when, when I went to grad school. And I can tell the story at great length if you, if you'd rather. But when I went to grad school, I was mid career, I was a journalist. I'd been a journalist for 10 years. I had a family. I went west from Boston to San Diego, California to study at the UC San Diego program in communication. And when I got there, there was this magazine, Wired magazine with this sort of pseudo psychedelic cover. And I had just finished a book while I was still a journalist about how Americans remember the Vietnam War. And in that book, computers were the emblem of the Cold War military state. And now here was Wired magazine with a trippy cover, you know, bright yellows and blues and these colors make you go, yeah, you know, and people like Stewart Brand, now they're fighting for the freedom of the machine at Treasury. And you're like, what? And I got to wonder, how was it that these people who I thought had always been anti technology, came instead to be supporting technology as the very tool of the revolution. Where did that change happen? And so that's the question I tried to answer and that's how I ended up with the book.

[B]

I wanted to kind of jump back to your early career, just briefly. I mean, do you think, tell us a bit about your career as a journalist and like, do you think that has continued to shape how you do things as an academic?

[A]

Without question. I mean, I think career as a journalist is a little strong.

[C]

Come on.

[A]

I was a more or less full time freelancer in Boston at a time when you could write for alt weeklies and actually get paid for it. So I wrote a lot of theater reviews, I wrote a lot of book reviews. I also did some hard news, I did a little bit of international news, but mostly I wrote sort of short commentary kinds of pieces. And the thing about that world is that in journalism the whole mission is to hold the attention of the audience. And you do that through a series of techniques that are a little alien to some parts of the scholarly world. The very first story I turned in at the Boston Phoenix, which was Boston's version of the Village Voice at the time, the very first story I turned in, it was an essay piece and I handed it to my editor because this was back in the day where you did hand in typescript I handed in a piece to my editor. She started laughing, and I said, why are you laughing? You've brought me a thumb sucker. Well, what's a thumb sucker? A thumb sucker turns out to be a journalistic piece that doesn't begin with a person, it begins with an idea. And so one of the things I learned in journalism is that you always lead with people because people want to know about people and ideas follow the people. And that's a trick that you certainly see me using in the Stuart Brand book. I've actually become very frustrated with that model, and I've tried to turn away from it to a degree, and I can say more about that. But I think stories are a bit of a curse, actually. But that's certainly one of the techniques that I learned. The other technique that I learned has been very helpful. That was about interviewing in academe. We often talk about ethnography and we kind of hold up a vision of a kind of disinterested, sympathetic, empathetic visitor who hangs out in a place for a period of time and learns a lot. And I know, Paulo, you and I have talked about this a lot. That's a valuable vision. But for a journalist, there just isn't that much time in the world. And so when you go out into the field and you've got a story to do, you go out with, for example, a magazine piece in your mind, you have a thesis, you're pretty sure you know what the story's going to be, you know about how many people you need to interview, what kinds of people. And you go out and you stay open minded. You very much stay open minded. You want to hear people tell you things that might change your thinking, no question. But you have a sense of scale and scope going in, and you have a kind of targeted relationship with your sources. You understand that the sources understand that everybody's pretty clear on the project. I try to bring that model of interviewing to my academic work. I think it's actually fairer all around. I think it's also more efficient. And if I have a disagreement with someone, or if I think I'm going to depict someone in a bad light, I'll just tell them during the. During the interview. We'll just talk it out. And so far that's worked out fine. But that mode of interviewing has been really important to me.

[B]

That's interesting. Does that mean you're going in looking for some of my journalist friends, like Aaron Gordon, who used to work at Vice, now works at Bloomberg. I think he's talked about how you're going to people looking for a specific kind of quote because you kind of already know their worldview and kind of looking for them to be that person.

[A]

Well, it depends on the kind of piece you're doing. That's certainly true for shorter form work. I still do long form magazine stuff now and again. And in that context you really go much more open ended. You try to find the people who are experts in the area that you work on. I did a piece of the New York Times Magazine where I spent time with folks who studied labor. People like Veena Dubal, who's a law professor, brilliant scholar, really terrific with her. I had read the material and I kind of knew what the pull quote might be, but that wasn't why I wanted to talk with her. I wanted a much more open, holistic understanding of her field. And then we got pull quotes. So it depends a lot on the genre of the thing that you're working on.

[B]

One more thing before we kind of kind of jump into revisiting C2C as it's called.

[A]

After 20 years, I am honored to have an acronym. Oh my gosh.

[B]

I was thinking about the kind of we might call the Ternarian approach. And

[A]

I have to savor this moment. I'm of a certain age where the fact that an approach could be called Ternaryan and there's a C to C. I mean, now I'm like, this is academic heaven right here.

[B]

Yeah, well, I was thinking about like, you know, like, do, do you. When you think about your work and kind of like the disciplines and literatures that have shaped you, I mean, what is it? Is it. Are you. Do you really think in terms of the literatures of communications is like shaping your thing? Is it cultural studies? I mean, when I was thinking about your approach, the word culture really does come to the fore in thinking about your whole career. So I don't know, how do you think about your work and the relationship between your thinking and various disciplines?

[A]

So it's a hard question. I tried very hard to avoid being associated with any discipline. And I think I work really hard to read widely, learn as much as I can. But at some level, I'm still the journalist hustling after questions that intrigue me. And I try to hustle after those questions in a way that's deeply informed and rigorous and in that sense, academic, but not disciplinary. I never set out to answer a question that the discipline poses. Often, I think we teach graduate students, there's this sort of fiction for graduate students that there was a hole. You need to find a hole in the discipline, a hole in the literature, and then fill it with your own special dirt. And no one I know actually really works that way. Far more often, what I see people doing is scrabbling after curiosities that just really bother them and trying to figure them out. And eventually they do figure them out. And as they do, they do it on behalf of other people. And that's very much how I work. A couple of principles of that kind of work. The first is I try very hard not to use jargon. I've been accused every now and again of not being theoretical enough. I assure you I've read my theory, and I'm working on a project right now on the 70s and 80s. And what happens when French theory hits the art world? You will see that I have read my theory. So, fine on the theory side. But I find that if I use theory, if I use jargon, it immediately excludes anyone who doesn't already speak that way. So I work very hard to translate the questions that animate me into plain language that travels across disciplines and to invite people in from all different disciplines. And in part for that reason, now I have appointments. In addition to communication, I have appointments in art history and history. History, American history at Stanford. Now, I haven't taken an American history course since high school, and I haven't taken an art history course ever. And yet apparently I'm qualified to teach both. And that's that. I think that's what happens when you just really follow your hungers and follow your curiosities and then try to use a plain language to speak to those issues. And of course, you do try very hard to be rigorous.

[C]

Yeah, you helped me a lot with that also, Fred. Also when I was writing my recent book that I always thought, really, what am I trying to get at here? And who. Who is my audience? And a lot of the time, I mean, there's this wonderful Howard Becker text on writing for social sciences. Did you even send me that? And it's really about, like, the positionality of, like, just being an academic of this kind of trying to look smart and be smart. And that's not really the whole point. And why are we name dropping sometimes? Theory. That doesn't really make any use, especially for the reader, the people that we are working with and studying. So, yeah, definitely, that resonates for sure.

[A]

Yeah. Thank you. I mean, I think being an academic is really tricky as distinct from being a journalist. You know, when you're a journalist, you write for an illusion of the general public. And that really is kind of an illusion. It's really what your editors tell you. It's how you feel when you walk through the newsroom. It's that kind of stuff. In our world, I think we write for the illusion of a field. However, we also have to get jobs and get tenure and get promoted. And we need certain markers to make that happen. And so we're always in this position of simultaneously trying to do original work, but also show how the original work contributes to the edifice that we're a part of. And that can create conflicts. I've worried a lot less about the edifice and much more about my curiosities. And I've been very lucky. I want to really emphasize this. I've been very lucky in my career. I wouldn't advise my own child to take some of the chances I've taken. But it has worked out and it's been deeply satisfying.

[B]

Paula, you had some great questions.

[C]

Yeah, sure, sure. I mean, maybe we can now go on to C2C. Now C2C.

[A]

Yeah, exactly.

[C]

With a 2. Like to make it cooler. Exactly, exactly. No, because I guess my thought, and Lee mentioned this when I wanted to talk to you and bring you on here, is that to think about where the culture, the countercultural ethos go. Right. And this question about how it merges with corporate power, maybe even as a background to our listeners that you then, after your book published this lovely article, very interesting article called Burning man at Google in New Media and Society. So listeners go check that out if you don't know it. And it also showed how elements of the Burning man world, most of us know what Burning man is sort of this kind of hippie festival in California. Hippie with a kind of large or small H, if you want to say. But it kind of was about how a lot of, I don't know, CEOs, execs, tech bros, etc. Started to go to Burning man and how they took some of the ideologies there and fused it also with their tech. Growth of Google, growth of other firms tried to help and shape and legitimate the kind of collaborative manufacturing processes of the tech world. Right. So long story short, I know, and I'm being cheeky here when I say, like, where did the countercultural ethos go? I know you've been writing about it, but maybe tell our listeners both where it was going in the last 20 years and where is it now really is. Are there fragments surviving, mutating, resisting. Right. So I'm curious what you think okay,

[A]

so to answer that question, we actually have to address not only where it went, but where it came from. One of the fictions around counterculture to cyber culture is that somehow I told the story of how hippies brought us computers. And that's not actually correct. What happens in that book is I talk a lot about how Cold war military research culture of the 40s and 50s opens up a kind of collaborative, interpersonal, super flexible style of living and working that then in many ways helps drive the rise of this newly educated hippie class. And the newly educated hippie class embraces technology, they embrace science, they embrace these things as techniques for achieving a new and better kind of society. So LSD is something that we take not just for fun, but it's something that we take to reveal the hidden informational order of the world. Much like Norbert Wiener first understood the hidden order of the world in the scientific world through mathematics. LSD is our access to math. I know that sounds strange, but that is the sort of 60s model. Okay? The key thing here for understanding where we are now and where we're going, I think, is that the counterculture, or at least the part of the counterculture that I wrote about, which is an anti political, pro technology, consciousness oriented kind of part of the counterculture, I ended up calling them the new communalists, for reasons I can explain, if that's helpful. That wing was always already technocentric, was always already in bed with the corporate world, already saw business and technology as the best way to do things as distinct from politics. The new left wanted to do politics and change politics, but the sort of new communalist line really didn't. They really embraced consciousness and technology. So for them, as we hit the 1980s, the 60s have begun to fall apart. The revolution didn't happen. The communes of the 1960s and early 70s mostly crashed and burned. It was a bad time. And in the early 80s, we see the rise of small computers, we see the rise of Apple and other companies, a transformation in Silicon Valley, and all these hippies are still kind of sitting around wondering what to do. And they begin to get work in the tech sector. And as they do, they bring tales of their support of consciousness and technology and new kinds of community into the tech sector with them. Now that generation is one generation ahead of the Peter Thiel, Elon Musk right wing brother types that we know now. But they set the stage for those folks. So. So Burning man starts in the late 1980s. Actually, it starts actually on a beach in San Francisco and it ends up heading to the desert in, I think in the early 90s, I forget which year exactly. And in the desert it becomes, you know, I think of it as a sort of the equivalent of a kind of chapel for the. For the new countercultural post industrial economy. In the 19th century, if you grew up in a small industrial town, you would go to church on Sunday and the bosses would sit in front the middle managers would sit right behind them and the workers would sit way behind them. The church was a chance to literally rehearse the order of the factory. In Burning man, what you have is project based teams called camps who go out into the desert, do things together, build this camp together, make art together. And once they're out there making art and building things together, they are literally living out the values of Silicon Valley. They are high performance teams making an object. And the difference is as they make that object, they make it for themselves. They don't just make it for the man. I talked to any number of people out there who have very sophisticated jobs and they would describe how. Yeah, but here I do it for myself. You know, Burning Man, I've gone three times. I don't need to go anymore. But I have had some of the most wonderful times in my life at Burning Man. But there were moments like, you know, riding along in a buggy, sort of an art buggy, with a naked 60 year old man in a loincloth. And only later was it revealed to me that this naked 60 year old man in a loincloth was a senior executive for Pixar. You know, it's that kind of a world. I mean, I met a Danish team over there, all in these beautiful, like, ABBA boots. I don't know why the Danes are imitating Swedish pop bands, but they were over there in these, like, fur ABBA boots. And we just got to chatting, we were partying, and they're like, yeah. And you know, we're like, we're a creativity team. You know, we're here on an off site. I'm like, what? They were there for creativity training. They'd flown across the Atlantic and across the United States to dance in the desert to try to figure out what MoJo was driving Silicon Valley. Because they were sure that it was there. Not in Denmark, not in staid industrial Denmark, but somehow out here in the West.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. But then it makes me think of like, who's sitting on those buggies and those chariots and who's. Who's there now? And I'm curious, okay, you haven't been for a while, but like today. And some would argue today still techely doesn't even pretend to be countercultural, nor could they even try to be countercultural. I mean, if you mentioned Zuckerberg in the back of like, I don't know, does he still go to Burning Man? Or these people, like they'll be laughed at and they'll be like eggs thrown at him. Or maybe it's just me throwing eggs at them, I don't know. But has the ideology of shifted from this communal dreaming to kind of bunker prepping planning your New Zealand whatever, land grabbing?

[A]

I think that, I think the Burning man and the Burning man ethos and the bunker prepping ethos aren't very far apart. O, you know, when you go to Burning man, it's a world that's incredibly difficult. The dust is incredibly hostile, it's super hot. You have to bring all your own stuff. If you don't bring enough water, you have to go begging at other camps. There's no money exchanged, so you can't buy things. Except for this one cafe and you can't live on that. So in essence, to make Burning man work, you have to build a bunker against the desert and then you can party. It's only after you've got your bunker up and running. Another thing about Burning man that I think is very much part of the prepper ethos and part of the seasteading ethos and the contemporary tech world ethos is escape. The idea of escape, and you're hearing this a lot now, you might have seen the Astor Taylor piece in the Guardian. Folks like Curtis Yarvin and others, Bali Srinivasan, have been advocating that we should simply escape this messed up world that we inhabit. We should go find our own patch of land in the ocean or somewhere. We should legislate it. Now that's the commune ethos writ large.

[B]

That's exactly back to the Landers.

[A]

Back to the Landers. We are special. We need to escape politics. We need to be free of that messy, messy business. And we need to go someplace and pursue consciousness. And we need to pursue it using technologies. In the 60s, the technologies were mostly LSD and automobiles. Today, no, there's still LSD in a lot of the tech world, but they're fancier in today's world. I think computers and both the money power that they generate for people who run the companies and the technological visions that they sort of enable still foster the dream of a separate world. That separate world, I would argue is not countercultural. And I actually would argue that Burning man was never deeply countercultural. You know, I've spent a lot of time out there. Very white, very wealthy, very plugged in. You know, really, really not a world that challenged the core values of mainstream America. Rather a world that embraced them. This episode is brought to you by Indeed.

[C]

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[A]

Yeah. I wonder if he's right. I mean, I, you know, I don't know. I think that it's interesting to think about institutions that might live without buildings.

[B]

Right.

[A]

You know, when you think about. When you think about the Catholic Church, they work because they're able to concentrate money, they're able to get buildings, they're able to build abbeys, they're able to claim land that the king can't have. They have this whole special story about why they get the land and the king doesn't. Burning man doesn't, I think, have any of that Burning Man. But it's a kind of repeated celebration, a kind of repeated party. And the infrastructure for Burning man is really an infrastructure of time. We know that every last week of August we're going to go to the desert. And the other thing that of course it depends on is public lands, but never mind. That's interesting. Yeah. I don't know if Stuart's right. Stuart has a lot of ideas, some of which I find super compelling, and others like the revivification of the woolly mammoth. Less so.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Yeah, sure. I saw him. I probably saw him a couple months ago at an event at the Long Now. I mean, we're not friends by any means, but I think either one of us would pick up the phone if the other called. And I have talked to him off and on across the years. He's been very generous with me. I will say there's a part of the book that's quite critical of Stuart. And he wrote the first review on Amazon and he praised the book for getting it right. And I've always been grateful for that. And he's done that a lot.

[C]

Oh, that's great. But maybe then moving to. Also back to Stuart Brandon, something that you said Also about Curtis Larvin, I'm not going to stoop so low and say, like, who's the new Stuart Brand from today? But a friend of my colleague of mine who you also know, Fred, Laura Hilla, she said, while you're interviewing Fred, I really want you to ask this question that she feels that people like Curtis Yarvin are being portrayed in the media and New York Times interviewing, etc. And giving them space. And there's a lot of, as you said, there's this like kind of vision of, yeah, what the Dark Enlightenment will do, what we will do through technology, and we have to like, leave and go on a different land, et cetera. But it's more dangerous than the euphoria of the kind of save the world through tech ideology that happened in the 90s. And I think, do we give a. Do we give these people like Yarvin more power than he has? Is this where also people are looking to when they're thinking of an alternative future? You know, I'm, I think this is a little bit more scary than what we had in the 90s, would you not say? And I'm wondering where you think this is going, who you think is the new Stewart Brand and also what is Yarvin and these kinds of people's space in this?

[A]

I think, I think it's very scary. I think it's. It's terrifically scary. It's one thing to take 20 or 40 of your friends and go back to the land and screw it all up and make each other mad and spend your money and get covered in mud and then go back home. That's one thing. It's quite another thing to do that to the world as a whole. And that's what I think is underway. I don't think that there is quite a new Stewart Brand per se. I can say that people like Peter Thiel have deliberately and self consciously adopted techniques that Stuart Brand used to send the ideas of Curtis Yarvin and others, the New Enlightenment, forward, the Dark Enlightenment, forward. So I don't think the press is giving Yarvin too much attention. I actually think they've been late to the game. I think they're giving him that attention because people like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk Musk not only believe the ideas of people like Curtis Yarvin, but have the power to promote them in the world. So I think we're late to the game on the Curtis Yarvins. He's incredibly influential in a very dark way. I think we're inhabiting a moment where people like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, members of the PayPal mafia, others have taken core ideas and core techniques from what we thought might have been a counterculture, which was in fact, I would argue, always a very hip version of mainstream techno culture. And they're turning those into glosses on ways they want to run the world. They want to run. I mean, people talk about this idea of exit. They want to run the world like a commune in which a dominant pseudo aristocratic male, usually a white male, dictates the state of play across the board and enforces that with technology. And technology provides the order. But who provides the order for technology? Well, those technologists whose wealth has already demonstrated that they are in fact the perfect entrepreneurial leaders for the future. That's a very kind of commune logic. Come back now. But it's a very dark logic when carried out at scale. It's a recipe for authoritarianism. And I'll just take this one step farther and remind everybody that at the start of World War II, an IBM subsidiary played an enormously important role in providing the underlying technology by which Jews could be rounded up. We often talk about media providing sort of fuel for authoritarianism by giving platforms to authoritarians. And that's very important. But the other thing that media do, especially digital media and media like that, is they provide the surveillance technology that allows the databases to be built, that allows people to be rounded up. And a lot of what you're seeing right now as Musk and Trump combine has the potential to build that kind of database going forward.

[C]

Can I just jump in quickly? Because one thing you said is that Yarvin and co are highly influential. Can you tell us, even the people across the pond or non us based, like, who is being influenced? And yeah, give us a little bit more juice around that. What do you, what can you say about that? Who's being influenced by them?

[A]

Are you asking me?

[C]

No, I'm Fred, Fred Lee as well. I don't know. Tell us a little bit more. Who do you think? Because I think it's like these kind of, of tech bros and people hanging out on some side discord and X channels. But maybe, yeah, tell us more. Who's being influenced? Is he that influential?

[A]

Yeah, so there's a handful of thinkers here in Silicon Valley who work broadly under the rubric of the Dark Enlightenment. And the Dark Enlightenment in this sense is not. Is sort of like, let's make the Enlightenment go dark. It's, it's, let's find an alternative and they are right wing thinkers. Curtis Yarvin is essentially a neo monarchist. He'd actually like to see kings come back. There are other variations of this. They have a few things in common. They believe in an elite, whether that's biological or monarchical in some other way, that elite tends to be male. They believe that technology can provide techniques for rule and for order making that are much improved over democracy. They think democracy's a mess, it's messy, it's a problem, it doesn't work well. They advocate for a world that, as you might expect, is radically deregulated, in which commerce and the development of technology are the highest good. That's a pretty good start. And the thing about Silicon Valley that may be hard to see from outside is that it's actually a pretty small world geographically. And so it provides easily for scenes. But the scenes aren't bohemian, artistic. Usually for that they go to Burning Man. They're technological, but the same rules that apply to scenes in artistic settings kind of apply here. So if somebody like Curtis Yarvin has an underground blog that everybody kind of reads and then we all sort of start talking about it and then it becomes a cool thing. It's like a scene. But now we're in a scene where the people who are, who are in the scene also have tremendous money and they build technologies that sell like crazy. And so the ability to amplify the scene and to turn it into a widespread story is unparalleled. It's a little bit like the Beats, maybe in New York or something like that. The scene is happening right in the middle of the power center. And so the power center can amplify and export the scene very easily.

[C]

That's super interesting.

[B]

I want to ask you a bit more about your relationship to Silicon Valley in a second. But before I forget to ask it earlier, you said something that really interested me, which is kind of like this kind of myth about what's in C to C that kind of, you know, these, you know. And it reminded me of these wonderful studies that the sociologist Andrew Abbott has of his own work and the work of Thomas Kuhn that shows that over time people's books and articles get reduced to like, single sentences that often bear no relationship at all to, like, what is in the actual text. And so I was thinking, yeah, I just wanted to ask if there is there anything else, like, as kind of C2C has taken on a life of its own and it gets so, you know, cited in all these places. If you've noticed any other kind of Trends about what people say or assume is in it that maybe is frustrating or just feel like it is not actually representative of what you were trying to do.

[A]

Well, first off, I want to just again, enjoy the fact that it has an acronym. I think that's great.

[C]

See this you use Fred. Really?

[A]

I've never seen that. I love it. I think that's great. I mean, I haven't been following it that closely. So one of the things that happens, one of the things that I find just in my own working life is that that books I've done that have been most successful are actually in some ways the most oppressive to me going forward. So I've been very, very lucky with counterculture. Right. It's done great. It is widely cited. I'm super happy about it. But it is also a challenge because it's like this big snowball rolling behind me all the time. It threatens to kind of roll me over and stop me from doing new and risky things that might not work out. Because it's like, well, that one worked out. I should do more of that. So I spend a lot of time avoiding what people are saying about technical. The last time I paid close attention was when the reviews came out. And it came out and they really surprised me. First off, I was very excited to get reviews, as any book writer would be, But I was just shocked. There was a full page review in Science. I was completely thrilled. I picked it up. I was just thrilled.

[C]

Wow.

[A]

Totally misread the book top to bottom, basically. He did the thing, the writer did, the thing that any scientist might want to do. He said, look, we're as cool as hippies.

[C]

No.

[A]

And Turner's book proves it. And it was just like, oh, ow, ouch, ouch.

[C]

No, you're still nerds, right?

[A]

And so the one thing I have seen that does bother me is there's a way in which the book gets tactically misread by folks in the sciences and in the tech world as evidence that they are in fact, as cool as Ken Kesey and his crowd were. What I'm trying to write an account of is how they became legitimate in that way and what they use the book for is to say we're legitimate. See, and that can be a little bit frustrating. But I'll say one more thing. And I know you guys both know this, but when you write a book, you can't control what people do with it. You might have a fantasy about how people are going to read it, and I said this, and they're going to hear it Nah, I mean, my books I've done. I guess I've done. I've done five books at this point. And each of them feels to me like a message in a bottle. I throw it out there. I hope it finds the island that needs to read the message. I hope for the best.

[C]

I feel bad that we're making the big snowball bigger. We're propagating this with this podcast.

[A]

Hey, hey, hey. No. Oh, no, no, no, no. Delighted to have any attention paid to the snowball at all. I have much littler snowballs also. So very happy.

[B]

No, no. Well, I wanted to ask you about one of your newer snowballs, which is the Seeing Silicon Valley book. And I just, like, as Paulo is kind of informing me, you've lived in mountain view for 22 years. Yeah. And so I saw the Seeing Silicon Valley book as kind of like you exploring the kind of dark sides of the place and your tensions that have arisen since your earlier work had kind of arisen. And also just you doing a really interesting and neat partnership with a photographer. Right. So, yeah, just tell us a bit about how that book came to be and how you kind of like, think of it fitting in your larger project.

[A]

Sure. Happy to. So the book is called Seeing Silicon Valley for a reason. When I began to think about doing it, I was getting intensely frustrated. There was this kind of ideology in the tech world of transparency. We make digital things. Everyone can be here. Everyone can do everything. But I knew from living right here in mountain view, about 2 miles from Google's headquarters, that the people who actually make the place run are invisible to the tech people who live here. I'll go to the taqueria and I'll watch the tech bro by the taco. And the two worlds do not connect. Invisible. And all the stories that I was hearing about tech and high tech and what it was going to do for the world weren't matching what it was actually doing for. And to the world that I actually inhabit. The world I inhabit is a highly raced world. It's very segregated. There's high levels of poverty, even though there are high levels of wealth, levels of inequality here are off the charts. And so I just. I wanted to kind of literally make visible what was here. And so what I did was I sat down and asked myself, okay, I need to find a photographer to work with. And I actually worked with a couple others earlier, and eventually a friend turned me on to Mary Beth's work. Mary Beth Meehan, who's a working class photographer from Providence, Rhode Island. She Grew up and I mentioned the class parts. It's going to be important for the story. She grew up in Southern Massachusetts in Brockton, Mass. An industrial town that underwent a series of transformations. And she's done a series of projects in mostly former industrial towns or former slave owning towns to reveal the kind of life of the place, given its history. And I found some funds and I brought her out here to California. We didn't know each other when we started working together. Brought her out here for California for about six weeks and she shot all through the valley and we just talked constantly. I introduced her to folks I knew and she's just incredibly good at finding her way into ordinary folks lives. The COVID of the book, the COVID of the American cover of the book is a beautiful woman named Teresa who works in Atakaria. And it's something that could have been a painting from the 18th century. It's just a beautiful, beautiful piece of work. Well, Mary Beth found her when she was buying a taco. And Mary Beth sees the people serving her and she asked permission to take the portrait and they got to know each other and it all worked out. And that's the thing about Mary Beth, she sees the people. Now, about the book. All right, so we go to do this book and we can't get it published. It was astonishing. We could not get this book published in America. I at this time, at that point, I had an agent, counterculture book had done really well. I've always been able to sell my work. Nope, absolutely not. And why not? Two reasons. First reason. And we heard this again and again from American publishers. That's not Silicon Valley. Where's Mark Zuckerberg? Where's Sergey Brin? Where are those people? And they literally couldn't see the valley that we were showing them. The blindness was so powerful. So we couldn't get it published in the US and we were very, very lucky. I have an incredible French publisher named CNF Editions. They publish our kinds of books, technology and culture books in France. They've been incredibly adventurous with me and good and they've supported my work from the very beginning. And they've translated everything I've ever done into French, for which I'm very grateful. So they decided to bring the book out and they brought it out in French first as Visages de la cuzeux com Vallee. I don't speak French. Apologies for the accent. And book did well in France. And then eventually two years later, an editor from Yale University Press moved to the University of Chicago Press and was then able to buy it. And so he bought the book. And now, Irony of Ironies. The book was a bestseller on Amazon. It was the top seller in photography for a few weeks. Sold out instantly. They only printed 2,000 copies. The 2,000 copies sell out in four weeks. And then. And they can't print anymore because they're printed overseas and it's like they can't get them back. So whatever the moral of the story is, people do want to see the real Silicon Valley. They really want to see through the myth. We know that we're living underneath the myth. We can see the cloud of ideology. We know we're there. And if you provide something that sees through that cloud and says no, here's how it actually is, people are grateful, People recognize it, people want it.

[C]

It.

[A]

And some of our cultural institutions, especially our publishers, I would argue, should be an awful lot more adventurous in serving visions of the way the world is versus the ideologies of how they think it ought to be.

[C]

It's really interesting, I would say, the

[B]

blindness of presses, I think so often presses get into their head like, this is what people want and they just can't see things. Go ahead, Paul.

[C]

Yeah, no, I just wanted to also riff on that because I come across a lot of my students here across the pond in Switzerland or I taught in Germany or Poland a lot. And yeah, there's people who don't. Can't really imagine what the Silicon Valley is like, really. And kudos to your French publisher for, like, actually believing in this book. But I just wondered if you could kind of even describe a little bit more what the vibes are right now and where not only, maybe both sides, one side is like, what is happening really on the streets among the working class or people who are not going on the buses to Google or to the Facebooks, et cetera. And then also on the Facebook side and all these, like, tech. Yeah, tech bros. Or whatever you call them. What is happening on these both sides right now? If you can describe the sort of energies.

[A]

Well, I think there's one word that describes the energy everywhere here in Silicon Valley and all across most of America, and it's fear. It's fear. We are watching an authoritarian takeover of our state, meaning our nation. And we are the leaders of large tech firms are trying to steer the ship into the storm so that they don't get swamped. They are very deliberately attaching themselves to the new political force, the new political power. Some of them, I think, are ideologically aligned with that already. So that's the Elon Musk's, the Peter Thiels, they are in favor of a right wing state. They are, are proto fascists and they are comfortable with that turn. The rest of us, I think, are more varied. A good friend of mine works closely with a lot of venture capitalists, and he described to me the week after Trump was elected, he said, yeah, all these guys are liberal Democrats for decades. And now they're all saying, well, Trump's probably not so bad. So there's that kind of turning toward power that's going on. Meantime, there's a lot of fear on the ground. Our gardens, our houses, mostly tended by Mexican Americans, many of whom are not papered. They don't have documents. And those folks are being very careful. The people who clean the buildings at Stanford, many of them are undocumented. And there's a student group providing alerts about where ICE will be. So there's a fear.

[B]

Has ICE been on campus?

[A]

That's not clear at this point. There have been rumors that ICE has been on campus. I don't want to repeat them. So I've heard multiple stories about that. So I just don't know the answer to that. That I do know that we have a policy from the university about how to respond if and when ICE comes to your door or your classroom. I had to send out that email. As a department chair, that's. I, you know, I'm ashamed that we're at that place. People are afraid. And, you know, many people have stopped speaking out, many people have stopped, have stopped stepping forward. I'll save you the long rant, but I think the dominant emotion here right now is fear, fear, fear. And then at the highest levels, among those on the right, opportunity. What is the opportunity, given the new leadership, to continue to profit and to grow our firms? And one of the opportunities that terrifies me the most is the opportunity that companies affiliated with IBM and others took in the 30s and the 40s. And that's the opportunity to provide the information infrastructure for authoritarianism, to provide the information infrastructure for ice. That scares the heck out of me when I see Elon Musk rummaging through the national databases, trying to knit them together. That looks to me like a straight up effort to build the infrastructure of fascism. And that's a terrifying thing, but I don't think that's something that all of Silicon Valley's workers would embrace. And I think that's a leadership thing.

[C]

And as part of.

[B]

Oh, it's been fascinating.

[C]

No, no, go, go. Just like. No, no, you go. Please go. Lee Close your eyes. Exhale.

[B]

Feel your body relax and let go

[C]

of whatever you're carrying today, while I'm

[B]

letting go of the worry that I

[C]

wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class, I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh my gosh, they're so fast.

[B]

And breathe.

[C]

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[A]

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[B]

Oh, no, I just, I mean, just to build on the infrastructure point, I mean we. In the last week, week or couple weeks here, there's been all these student visas getting canceled across the nation. And we had six students I think here at Tech, and then two alums fit that bill. But it's just like I'm really interested in the technological side of it because it's like, it looks like maybe they just ran like the student visa. I'm saying ICE or Doge or whoever is doing it just ran like the student visa database against any kind of criminal infraction database, including like, maybe even like traffic violations. But I mean, just to drive your point home, it's just, it's. We don't know yet.

[A]

But the infrastructure and I think there's something even creepier going on. You might have noticed that, you know, I believe it was Laura Loomer, who's a right wing conspiracy theorist, got Donald Trump to get rid of the head of the nsa. That move of far right conspiracy theorists, theory oriented groups telling the administration what to do. I think that's one of the things that we're seeing here. You know, the, the woman who was arrested, I believe at Columbia had written one op ed in a student newspaper. You know that when. Who's tracking that? Well, it's not the state and I don't even think that's databases. I think what's happening is that folks on the right are tracking Those folks.

[B]

Yeah, like Heritage foundation or whoever. Yeah.

[A]

And they can leverage the information that's been gathered by the state to make that move. So that. That's the move that I see and scares me.

[C]

Are some of these infrastructures also. Now let's move on to, like, AI evangelism. LLM tools is part of it. The whole, like, wave of AI optimism, you said, is also, of course, to make a bunch of money by a lot of these people.

[B]

I got a bunch of AI questions for Fred.

[C]

Okay, okay, okay.

[A]

Oh, no.

[C]

I just wonder if that's part of the. What you'd see the infrastructure of, like, on their side there. You know, on the face value, they're doing this like, yes, let's build tools and invest in tools that will change society. But in the end, is it really just another tool for neo fascism or other forms?

[A]

Well, I think. I think so. Let's break it down a little bit. I think the. The utopian claims for AI and the dystopian claims for AI are part of what a scholar named Rob Kling and Susie Yakano used to call a computerization movement. And these happen. I saw this in the 90s with the web, with virtual communities. And as a new technology comes into being, a group of actors, usually from the industry, will partner with others, sometimes from advertising, sometimes from academe, and begin to tell stories about the potential of this technology for whatever change. Change. Those stories let you make a lot of money, you know, so they let you make a lot of money as you sell the. Sell the technology if you're in the business. But they also let academics make a lot of money. As you may have noticed, lots of schools are hiring scholars of AI now. Right. Playing resources within your university. You can say to your dean, I'm on the cutting edge. Look, we're doing AI. And so if you can define a cutting edge, then you can orient a lot of activity around it. You can make a lot of money. Money. I think that's the primary driver with AI. I think authoritarianism and the rise of authoritarianism across the world, but especially in the United States, is emerging from a kind of related but somewhat different dynamic. I see the rise of authoritarianism as. And I only know the American case. I'm a real Americanist. In the American case. I see the rise of authoritarianism being a post Vietnam War phenomenon that's taken a couple of generations to take hold. I look at the end of the Vietnam War and I see a generation of men, working class men, who went to fight, fight their peers, in the universities stayed out of the war, they stayed in the academic setting. They were excused from having to fight. When those men who fought came back, the industries where they expected to have jobs like their fathers had had after World War II were being outsourced, offshored by the very people who had not had to fight the war. And as the information economy rises, it's the people who didn't have to fight the war who find places in it and it's the people who fought the war who do not not. And those folks, those working class folks come from the towns of western Pennsylvania, come from Ohio, come from the Rust Belt. And it's that region of people, it's that those working class folks who are driving a lot of the MAGA movement. So, so I see that as that. But then, then that movement happens to be simultaneous chronologically with the development of new technologies. And that's when you get the opportunity for arbitrage. You get the opportunity to move back and forth. People who are looking for things to do with LLMs and looking for things to do with AI look over and say, wow, there's this social movement over here, let's glom onto that. And people in the social movement look back over at the tech and say, hey, let's use that. This is very much what happened with counterculture and cyber culture. It's a very similar kind of social process but with different groups.

[B]

But Fred, have you read about the working class thing and that?

[A]

Have I read about it or written about it?

[B]

Written about. Written about what you just think? Because I've been thinking, I've been doing a reading group with some friends, Eric Council and my colleague Daniel Breslau and like the notion of the professional managerial class, that's what the left and then the new class on the right. But it's really about trying to understand like the rise of Trumpism and the kind of anti organizational, anti professional thing. And I've been really thinking about this kind of tension with the working class that you just outlined. And I was just, I mean, is there a place to go for like.

[A]

I wish there were. So my very first book, the book I wrote when I was still a journalist, is a book called Echoes of the Vietnam War and I American Memory. And it addresses all these issues, but it was published in 1996 and so it addresses them from a really different perspective. But that's how I know about this stuff. I spent several years interviewing traumatized combat vets in the Boston area. So it was that experience that sort of showed me this. But No, I haven't written about that as such. And it's on the long list of things that I want to do when I'm not sharing a department and teaching classes and.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Related to Silicon Valley. There's kind of our discussion of Silicon Valley. I wanted to ask you about Texas and maybe we've already covered this in some way, but like, it's been really striking to see the kind of list of characters we have brought up, like Musk and Teal and these folks, like literally start moving enterprises from California to Texas. And I just wonder like, how you've been thinking about that.

[A]

Well, I love the question partly. So you wouldn't know that I actually have a commission from the Baffler to write a long piece on that question. Okay. So, yeah, so that's due August 8th. As you can tell, the deadline is much in my mind and it's a great question. I need to do more homework, but my preliminary digging says. Oh yeah, Texas all the way down. When you think about Texas ideology, you can think about a wildcatting ideology. We're going to go out. The land is ours to take from and explore war. Our job is to exploit and may the strongest man win. It's the war of all against all. We're going to overrun whatever's there and take it. And if anyone tries to take it from us, well, we have the Alamo. Right. We'll fight them back. Moreover, there's a kind of racial ideology there. The fact of Texas is that it's a multiracial world. But the old white fantasy of Texas is a fantasy that the Mexicans are at the border. Border. Those dark skinned Mexicans are at the border and the Indians are to the north. And oh my gosh, we're going to have this sort of white fort in the middle of. In the middle of America. And so that stuff is in the middle as well. Yeah. It's interesting. You know, I think it's in some ways easier to see the malevolence of Texas style entrepreneurship.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, Than it is to see the California version. The California version looks really sweet and hip and. And I mean, who wouldn't want to. Loud in the sun, stoned, watching the colors float by. Right. But the California model is pretty malevolent as well. And I think that one of the things I want to capture in the essay is the way in which the Texas ideology echoes, builds on, amplifies dreams of exit, dreams of capture of formerly public wealth that are very much alive in California as well. Well, that's Good.

[C]

Would you say that, Fred, this is one of your next projects. Can you tell us a little bit about the array of things that you're doing, I guess, in your method?

[B]

Sure.

[A]

Happy to. Yeah. So I feel really lucky. So one of the things about the Counterculture book is that people want me to write the counterculture book for the Right. And I get asked that a lot, and I wish I could. It's one of those things where the snowball is behind me and I'm like, wow, if I could just. If I could just make myself care about this. I mean, several years back, I started looking at Peter Thiel's time at Stanford and thinking I should do something like that. I just couldn't get the mojo for it. And I'm happy to report that a PhD student of mine who's going to start at MIT next year, Becca Lewis, is writing that book, and it will be amazing. She has done an incredible dissertation on the rise of the right in Silicon Valley. And it's going to be a great book. So props to Becca Lewis. Check her stuff out. She's publishing already. She's great. So that's good.

[C]

It.

[A]

I have two broad strands in the kind of things that I'm thinking about. One is I still do tech right stuff. So the Baffler piece will be a long piece on the Texas ideology. I'm still trying to think in the Texas ideology. Yeah, I think it's actually called the working title in shop is the Texas Ideology. So I'm trying to work on that and present on that. And that's kind of an article length thing. And then for the last three years or so, I've been working on a book that is. It's so different from where I come from that I'm almost nervous to talk about it, but I think it's actually an extension of where I come from. Okay, so the counterculture book sits in the middle of what is now becoming a trilogy. After I finished the Counterculture book, I wrote a prequel to that book called the Democratic Surround, which was about the rise of democratic multimedia in the 40s and 50s and how that world helped spawn the 60s. Now I'm in a book that's very much focused on the New York art world of the 1970s and 80s, which, though we don't remember it, is a place where new media technologies like cable television, the boombox, the Walkman video, all collide with an art world focused on establishing new kinds of identity around sexuality, particularly feminism and gay rights during the. During the AIDS era. And what I'm trying to argue is that between about 1973 and about 1993, when the world Wide Web kicks into gear year, between the end of the Vietnam War and the coming of the World Wide Web, there's a turn in American society. We leave the liberal world of the mid century behind, and we open ourselves out onto a world in which we, at least some of us, especially on the left, imagine politics as a species of mutual representation, of showing ourselves to one another, of signaling to one another of identity politics. It isn't called identity politics yet, but it's going to become identity politics in the early 90s. And what I'm trying to chronicle is that turn from the liberal era to the identity era. How did that happen? And I think one of the answers to the question of how that happened is the art world. I think it happened in part in the art world in America, in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s, mostly. So this book features people, some of whom are quite well known, like Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, others who are perhaps less well known. And, you know, I mean, it's got a kind of cheesy title right now. My working title right now is City of Desire. How the New York Art World Set the Culture wars on Fire.

[B]

Hey, all right. Yeah,

[A]

but it's meant to be the deeper story behind the sort of effort at a sexy title, which is just sad, but I do the best I can. The deeper story connects back to counterculture because I think what happens in the New York art world world is that it becomes a place like San Francisco was in the. In the 90s, where ideas from earlier eras flood in, particularly French theory, particularly ideas of the post human, of the anti human, of the challenge to Cold War liberal humanism that's coming from France really hits the art world. And it gives people in the art world and in feminism and in ACT UP circles a whole new language with which to express what it means to be. Whatever they are, are. So what it means to be a woman becomes something very different. What it means to be. To be a gay man becomes something very different. A person with aids. It becomes very different. And by the time we're done in this story, we have people like Jesse Jackson and American politicians gathering at the mall, the National Mall, to look at the quilt, the AIDS quilt. Suddenly, a formerly invisible, highly stigmatized group, their bedding is laid out on the lawn, the national lawn, the center of the nation. And we can begin to imagine a society that accepts, celebrates, and organizes itself around, among other things, sexual desire. Now, of course, the right goes haywire on this. The right hates this. And I would argue that one of the things that we're seeing now in the attacks on LGBTQ people, on people

[B]

of color, whole anti woke movement.

[A]

The whole anti woke movement is a delayed response to the thing whose rise I'm trying to chronicle.

[B]

Yeah, that sounds right.

[A]

Yeah. So that's what I'm doing these days. Cool. Yeah, it is great. It feels strange to be working. First off, it's just tremendously inconvenient to be based in California, working on a project based in New York. It's like, what's up with that? That's just a bad choice.

[B]

You just wanted to hang out in New York as much as possible, right?

[A]

Is that what's going on? I kind of do more. I've spent a lot of time in California. I'm sort of ready for Manhattan. That's right.

[C]

Right.

[B]

Well, Fred, this has been so awesome. And Paula, buddy, thank you for joining me and doing this again and thank for getting Fred on. This has been a really wonderful conversation.

[A]

It's been. Thank you both. I feel so lucky to be able to talk with you. I really appreciate it.

[C]

And Lee, we're expecting an invite to your book club, please, because, yeah, it's been really lovely to chat and you guys are both really lovely and thank you.

[A]

Right back at you both.

[B]

I hope you enjoyed this episode of our podcast. You can reach us with questions, comments and [e-mail] or by following me on Twitter @stsnews or on YouTube @peoplesthings. Our podcast is distributed by the New Books Network, the leading platform for academic podcasts. So that you can find us wherever you get your podcasts. Peoples and things, like most things in this world, depends on the work of many people. I want to thank my brother Jake Vincel for writing the music for the show. I want to thank my buddy, Juliana Castro for designing the logos for the podcast. You can check out her work at julianacastro Code. Joe Fort is the producer for the podcast and Mandy Lam is the production assistant. This podcast and other Peoples and Things programming are produced in affiliation with Virginia Tech Publishing and supported by the center for Humanities and the University Libraries at Virginia Tech. For information about other podcasts from Virginia Tech publishing visitors, visit Publishing Vt Edu. For the entire Peoples and Things team, I am Lee Vincel and most importantly, I want to thank you for listening. Thanks,

[C]

Sam.