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Matthew Benjamin Cole, "Fear the Future: Dystopia and Political Imagination in the Twentieth Century" (U of Michigan Press, 2025)
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For a limited time at McDonald's get a Big Mac Extra Value meal for $8. That means two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun and medium fries and a drink. We may need to change that jingle. Prices and participation may vary. Well I was down on my last dollar Then I started saving cause the bank said fiscal restraint is what you're craving so I put my earnings in a high yield account let the savings compound and the interest mount I'm optimizing cash flow putting debt in check. Now time is my praying and out of PA and we've got a little cash to rebuild the old debt Boring money moves make kind of lame songs but they sound pretty sweet to your wallet PNC bank brilliantly boring since 1865 recently we asked some people about sharing their New York Times accounts. My name is Dana. I am a subscriber to the New York Times, but my husband isn't and it would be really nice to be able to share a recipe or an article or compete with him in wordle or connections. Thank you Dana. We heard you introducing the New York Times Family Subscription one subscription, up to four separate logins for anyone in your life. Find out more@nytimes.com family.
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B
Welcome to the New Books Network. Today we're joined by Matthew Benjamin Cole, political theorist and visiting assistant professor at Binghamton University. Dr. Cole works on modern and contemporary political thought with a special focus on how the imagination shapes politics. He's published in Contemporary Political Theory, Environmental Politics, and Political Research Quarterly, and has written for the Boston Review. Before Binghamton, he taught at Harvard, Emerson, and Duke, where he earned his Ph.D. in political science. His work ranges widely Dystopian Imaginaries in Politics, George Orwell's Psychopolitical Insights, a counter history of environmental politics tied to decolonialization and demilitarization, and critiques of technological dystopias. Across all of it, he's asking how the future will be shaped by us or for us? His courses include the New Authoritarianism, Climate, Justice, Technology, Power and Politics, and the Politics of Dystopia. His new book, Fear the Dystopia and Political imagination in the 20th century, recently released by Michigan University Press, argues that dystopia is more than a literary genre it's a political imaginary that shaped 20th century debates about power, freedom, and responsibility. Drawing on figures from Orwell and Huxley to Arndt and Focal, Cole shows how dystopian thinking has both warned of domination and pointed toward new possibilities for freedom. Professor Cole Matthew, it's a pleasure to talk with you about your new book, your scholarship, and your thoughts on the U.S. social and political landscape.
- [03:17]
A
Great. Thanks for having me on the show. I'm excited to talk about the book.
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B
Before we dive into the book itself, I'd really like to hear a bit about how this project came about, what set you on the path to writing it, and is there a story behind your striking cover design?
- [03:34]
A
Absolutely. So I'll get around to the COVID since that comes later in the process. In terms of the inspiration for the book, this did start out as my dissertation when I was a graduate student studying political theory at Duke, and at that moment I was still trying to find my voice in terms of what story did I want to tell about political thought and political action? How could I take the toolkit that I had acquired studying the history of political thought, even as my own concerns really gravitated toward the present day? Looking out at a landscape where people were concerned about the emergence of new forms of oligarchy, of intrusive technologies, whether those are surveillance or manipulative social media, and then later intensifying concerns about the resurgence of authoritarianism and the decline of democracy, I really wanted to ask what, if anything, the canon of political thought had to inform us about this horizon, about the dangers and opportunities that were confronted with in the 21st century. And as I was mulling over those questions, I've always been an avid reader of literature, both classic and contemporary. I noticed this strange sensibility creeping into a lot of the fiction that I would read in my spare time. Writers like Kazuo Ishiguro with his novel Never Let Me Go, or Margaret Atwood with her Oryx and Crake novel, Cormac McCarthy with the Road. These were all writers who had written primarily realistic fiction or historical fiction, something other than genre fiction for most of their careers, who are now gravitating toward these dystopian and apocalyptic imaginaries. And I thought there was a clue there about how the political imagination was transforming when readers who weren't necessarily inclined towards sci fi or speculative fiction, and writers who were really inclined to this terrain either, were now asking us to contemplate these dreadful futures of destruction or dehumanization. And so, working backwards from there, working with the toolkit of intellectual history and asking questions about the history of political ideas, I started to unravel this question of where dystopia came from. I was surprised to learn it was a much more recent innovation than I might have guessed, and I wanted to know how it influenced the way we thought in the 20th century. As it happens, the year that I defended my dissertation, I was 2017. So it was just after Brexit, just after Trump's inauguration, and another moment where dystopia sort of took on this virality in the culture. Novels like the Handmaid's Tale, like 1984, like Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here were bestsellers again. And everyone was looking to the pages of dystopian fiction to understand this new world. And so that became a pivot point in the project, because there was a part of me, of course, that Having completed my PhD and started some new adventures and projects, was willing to just turn the page on this and say, okay, well, that was my first. First thing. What else can I write about? But the. The resurgence of dystopia, just as I closed down the first phase or stab at the project, really motivated me to continue revisiting these texts and ideas and inspired me to consider whether there was more to say about this. It convinced me that I did have an important story to tell, if I could get more clear with myself about the genealogy of dystopia as well as about its implications for contemporary political life. And so that's led me to the book version of this study, which, you know, it's changed dramatically, just as our world has in the intervening years, but I feel that it can still speak to our moment. As far as the COVID art, when it came time to make the book into a real book. This was, of course, one of the things that I was most excited about. Dystopia, specifically, when you look at it through the lens of the political imagination, Right. We're putting imagery front and center there lends itself to, of course, a wide range of visualization, but it is a strongly suggestive of images of the, you know, the landscapes of dystopian cinema. And I. And so I knew there was an opportunity to do something really cool. At the same time, I was terrified of having something that looked like a leftover PowerPoint slide or some kind of AI slop on the COVID of the book. Not that I think Michigan would do me dirty like that, but I had seen covers, you know, where if the author wasn't diligent about coming forward with ideas proactively, you would. You would end up with something, you know, maybe you weren't going to be proud of. So I started reaching out to artists whose work I liked and just, you know, feeling out who might be willing to collaborate. And I was actually really pleased that most of the authors or the artists that I reached out to were very willing to contribute, thought the project sounded cool, like the idea of having their work on the COVID of a book. But this piece was done by Cleon Peterson, who's a contemporary artist based out of LA who does really fascinating work that all take on these themes of power and corruption and violence and modernity, and they're infused with these classical forms, but show very distinctly modern panoramas of power and submission. And I became aware of his work because he was working with a group called Artists for democracy in 2024 that were using art to depict the stakes of the 2024 election. And of course, it didn't go the way they were. They're hoping their intervention would. But that led me to browse Kleon's catalog. And so when I reached out to him about, you know, an image for the book, he was really receptive and essentially, you know, told me to tell him which pieces I was interested in. And unless there was some particular reason why he wouldn't be able to let it be on the COVID of my book, that he would. So the image that we have on the COVID now, he originally produced for the New Yorker as part of a piece about a lesser known dystopian novel called Kalakane by Susan Boy, who is a Swedish writer, and she wrote in response to the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany. So he created the piece in that context, but I think that outside side of it, it really emblematizes a lot of the issues about technology, social control, the connection between the mind and the sort of external social environment. We can see the kind of mindscape becoming a cityscape on the image. So I think it's a really rich visual for a lot of the themes that I explore in the book. And its distinctive color palette is also infused throughout the final copy of the book. We went through several rounds of the COVID typography, color layout before. We were all happy with it, but I think it now is something really fantastic. And hopefully people who are listening and haven't seen a physical copy of the book or the. Or the COVID will check it out because I think it's really great. And I imagine some people will pick up the book based off of the art and the. The overall cover design, which I think are fantastic embodiment of what I was trying to do with the book.
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B
Oh, no, no doubt. Thanks, Matthew. Well, let's move into the book.
- [10:27]
A
In.
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B
In your book's introduction, you describe one of its aims as an explanatory account of the dystopian imagination. How would you say this differs from a purely literary or fictional approach to dystopia?
- [10:43]
A
It goes to a central question of this study, which is, what exactly is a dystopia? Of course, dystopias are a popular category or genre of speculative fiction, and at this point they're such familiar ones that they can become kind of a, you know, a default setting for young adult novels, video games, and other kinds of entertainment. You know, sometimes that spirit of social protest that infused some of the older works is dimmer in these because dystopia is just kind of a genre or set of trope that is available for the taking. But I thought we missed something about the role of dystopias in our political thinking if we relegated it simply to the fiction section. After all, it's common enough to hear people throw around the term dystopia when they talk about our possible futures or even our present. You know, are we already living in some kind of fascist or technocratic dystopia? How do we avert the AI Dystopia, Right. These are the types of things that you'll see throwing a ballot game, you know, op EDS and analysis pieces all over the net and the prep. So dystopia is doing some kind of work in our political vocabulary that goes beyond a reference to, you know, those iconic dystopian novels or their sort of contemporary successors. One of the things that initially motivated me to do the study was reading philosophers like Hannah Arendt, who I was exposed heavily to in graduate school, or Jacques Ellul, the French theorist of technology, who I worked my way toward more independently. These are philosophers, and just two examples out of many who warn us of these corrupting or dehumanizing social trends that they take to be deeply written into the trajectory of modern society. And they warn us by telling us at length about the grim futures that they'll lead us toward. And it occurred to me that these types of textual arguments were performing the same operations as the well known fictional dystopias like Orwell's 1984 or Huxley's Brave New World. Looking at it from the other side, those novels would be misunderstood if we considered dystopia just as this bundle of genre tropes, when those novels extended, often quite directly, sometimes very literally, and in extremely similar language, from arguments that their authors were pursuing in their non fictional polemics, in their capacities as social critics or political commentators. So my hunch was that dystopia was not Fundamentally a form of fictional writing, it was a way of imagining the social world and its potentialities, its possible futures. The famous 20th century novels and the many popular 21st century ones are a formidable expression of dystopian thought. But as a political theorist and a historian of political ideas, I thought there was more to say. I was curious about how this dystopian outlook emerged, how it shaped political thought in the 20th century, and what it said about our time, that we're constantly imagining these dystopian futures for ourselves, because people are always saying, especially those on the left who long for alternatives to the status quo, that the political imagination has atrophy. And if you want to see a robust utopian imagination, then that observation perhaps holds true. But it occurred to me that in a different way, our political imagination is quite active and powerful, which is not necessarily to say healthy, because beyond dystopias, which are the subject of my vote, there are also apocalyptic politics. There's conspiracism. Sometimes politics seems to be so absorbed in the terrain of fantasy and the imaginary that it becomes worrying. But like it or not, you know, or. Or like specific expressions of the political imagination or not, that the political arena is an arena of the imagination. Jurgen Habermas once said that people don't fight for abstractions, but they do battle with images. Right. And I think when we look at the terrain of contemporary politics, we see on the right, on the left, and on the center different ways of deploying the imagination to galvanize political action, to avert or divert attention and mobilization in specific directions. And so, even beyond the account of dystopia, there's a wider conversation about the role of the imagination in politics, both its possibilities and constructive applications and its liabilities that we have to contend with as inhabitants of a political world that is both real and imaginary.
- [15:10]
B
Well, you argue that the rise of dystopian thought should be seen as a pivotal event in the history of political ideas. How might this perspective influence how we think about current and future political challenges?
- [15:25]
A
It gives us perspective on where dystopia came from, and in that respect, maybe gives us a little bit of distance from a political climate where dystopia is so pervasive and so naturalized in our political discourse that it can seem just like common sense. Right. Part of what you do when you engage in politics is try to, you know, avert these dangerous futures. We think about politics as an endeavor of future making almost by. By happenstance, and those are the stakes of the political decisions that we make. But this way of thinking is relatively new in the grand sweep of human politics. This is one of the things that, taking the long view of the history of political ideas, sheds light on, as I'm sure we'll discuss further. The modern era takes a very different view of the future and the possibilities of social transformation, initially their potential and later their peril that had not occurred to previous eras in history. And so I thought that we could get some clarity about why we are so vexed by dystopias if we understood where that outlook came from. And this isn't to then discredit any particular dystopian scenario that one might be haunted by or seek to avert, but it does allow us to step back and say, you know, why has this become sort of our. One of our default heuristics for thinking about the political world and the stakes of our political decisions? Can we get more clear about what affordances there are, what limitations there are to looking at the present as a sort of decision point between possible futures?
- [17:13]
B
Well, you have talked a bit about and have certainly implied that there's a real constructive element to the dystopic. Can you share how dystopic thinking can be constructive rather than purely pessimistic? And I mentioned that in relation to the opening of the book where you have that great Ballard quote, and then you dive right into his short story, Concentration City. Later you weave in his works more broadly. Can you talk a bit about that with us?
- [17:46]
A
Sure. So let me start with the point about the constructive uses of dystopia, because this is a major point that I want to make in a book. There are many critiques of dystopian thinking that see it as apolitical, as fatalistic is giving up on the possibility of a positive future. At the height of dystopia mania following the 2016 election, Jill Lepore, for example, wrote a piece for the New Yorker criticizing this obsession with dystopias as something that contributed to political paralysis and kind of defanged the possibilities of resistance, which I don't really agree with either as an analysis of dystopian thought or descriptively, in terms of what people who were moved by dystopian warnings were doing during, you know, the first Trump administration. Or you could look at these protests where people were dressing up as the. The handmaids from the Handmaid's Tale to go on the defensive for democratic institutions, for women's rights. It seemed to me that. That the people who were forewarned were. Were then willing to fight to avert those futures. They weren't just, you know, curling up and, and crying. So it seemed that dystopia did something well there. And I think that this goes to the main objective of dystopian thinking, which is to warn us. Right. There's that element of the cautionary tale. What will happen if, to use the name of one of Robert Heinlein's book, if this goes on. Right. It's always this business of extrapolating from our present and connecting the dots to the possible futures. But in issuing a warning, a dystopian writer has to emphasize that there's still capacity for choice. The future hasn't been determined yet, and we may yet be able to change course. So dystopians are often quite pessimistic. I wouldn't contend that. I also think pessimism sometimes gets a bad rap. Often we insist that we are sort of entitled to hope, that we need hope to be motivated to act, and, and therefore we need to come up with hopeful future scenarios, even if we don't really believe them. And I, I've never really put much truck in that. I think that well reasoned pessimism has its place and we don't do ourselves any good chasing, you know, sort of delusional fantasies just because they might motivate us to, you know, to work a little harder. We need to be realistic about our problem. But in any event, while while dystopian thinkers may be pessimists, I think they're very rarely true fatalists. Even if we want, we hesitate to then call it optimism. Lewis Mumford, the great American philosopher who I discuss in the book, really not in as much depth as I would like. I have plans to revisit some of his work in future projects. I once described himself as a pessimist about probabilities, but an optimist about possibilities. Right. So the, the likely trajectory of social evolution looked pretty dire to him. He saw it's merging into what he called mega machine. But there was still some other alternatives at play, even if the, the odds didn't look good. Similarly, George Orwell wrote after World War II that he felt, you know, as a democratic socialist at the outset of the Cold War, like a doctor treating an all but hopeless case. Right. He argued that you had to acknowledge realistically that the patient was probably going to die, but until they did, or until they were truly terminal, you were duty bound to try to save them anyway. Right. And so I do think dystopia often has this kind of ethos of mumford or of Orwell, where you see that realistically the odds are stacked against you and your, your hopes for a more humane society or more equal society. But as long as it, it's not a true impossibility, you. You keep working at it and then the, the dystopian pessimism becomes kind of a foil or crucible that can focus our, our political thinking in its own way by, by helping us fight back against the, the political evil that our agents are liable toward. Now, with respect to Ballard specifically, his role is a little bit different from that of, say, in Orwell because I think Ballard's texts are a bit more ambiguous for the most part. And certainly the Concentration City, I point at the beginning of the novel because I think it's a more puzzling work than even some of Ballard's own pieces. Like Kingdom Come, I think is Ballard working much more in the classic dystopian vein of making a pretty linear extrapolation from the present and telling a story about a kind of what he calls an ugly suburban fascism that target immigrant and refugee and is now hardly even speculative. Right. He wrote that before Brexit and before Trump, but it's aged. I don't want to say well, but it's, it's proven prescient. Right. But not all of his books fit into that prescriptive mode of, you know, this is a dire warning about where things are going right now. What initially struck me, why, why I gave him the first word in this book was this description of the 20th century as a marriage of reason and nightmare. To me, that's an idea reminiscent of what I found, you know, as a scholar, political theory in a text like Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, which opens with this striking claim that the fully enlightened earth radiates with disaster triumphant. People like Ballard, people like Horkheimer and Adorno, you know, they're referring to the mechanized slaughter of the trenches In World War I, the industrialized extermination processes of the Nazi death camps, the atomic holocaust of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You know, these are the most vivid, iconic examples where the peak of our technological potency and our ability to plan and control and invent meet our most destructive impulses. And much dystopian thought dwells in this terrain where the world has in one sense been conquered by reason and another succumb to insanity, to unreason entirely. Rather than making the world transparent, the attempt to rationalize it has made it horrifying and surreal. So the concentration study, I thought Made for an effective opening because it posed a puzzle of what we really do when we imagine a dystopia. It's didactic, but, you know, I would say it's more Kafkaesque than Orwellian. You really ask yourself what you know, what is going on here. It seems to say something about the world we live in, but there's also something surreal, an element of a parable about it. But the point that really drove home to me, as well as some of Ballard's later reflections and stories like the Terminal beach in his essays about the need for science fiction to explore inner space, was an insight about what I would call the psychological architecture dystopia. The way that these nightmare worlds, which we imagined as cities or state, externalize interior states and a kind of collective psychological crisis. And that clue guided my broader interpretation of dystopia as creating cityscapes, societies, landscapes that stood in for an internal crisis of confidence. And one that's particularly relevant to the political arena insofar as it is, at least in part, not just an existential crisis about, you know, the individual's search for meaning. Though I think there's a great deal of dystopian commentary on that as well. But more broadly, a world that seems to become more planned, more controlled, more subject to automation and conformity, and one where the possibilities for political action, for self rule, seemed to be dissipating. And so I let Ballard open the story because I thought he gave us the nice tableau of these different ways the dystopia imagination might function, both as the kind of didactic warning, you know, the if this goes on type of statement, as well as something a bit more obscure, a bit more troubling about, you know, what it is to exist in the modern world.
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B
Yeah, and I don't mean to distract from that opening. I think it was really interesting and engaging. It, like, pulled you right into your narrative. And I like the way you cover the ground with Ballard. Your mention of the other original title, Buildup, because I wanted to ask you as kind of an inside baseball question, now, you've been through this process of publishing your first book. If someone had come to you about a title change or about the title, do you find the buildup versus Concentration City, is that an issue? How do you think about that?
- [26:22]
A
Buildup was published in New Worlds, which was really the flagship publication for what eventually became to be known as the new wave of science fiction. And Ballard's one of the key figures in that, is a moment when, as per Ballard's prompt, many science fiction authors turned from exploring outer space to questions about inner space. They turned from the hard science of space travel and nuclear energy to asking questions by the social sciences, by psychology, asking questions about the human mind, about gender relationships, about political hierarchy. Right. And you see that kind of extended in works by people like Harlan Ellison and Ursula K. Le Guin a little bit late, Octavia Butler, these writers who took a different approach to science fiction right now, less about robots and aliens and lasers. Right. And which is to be reductive about what, you know, was going on in the golden age of sci fi, but. But pivoting to something a bit more socially and politically engaged, also infusing the sci fi literature with the kind of sensibility of modernism and later postmodernism. And so Ballard kind of stands at that inflection point with buildup. You know, as for the story, I suppose buildup does kind of beat to that Heinlein if this goes on type of thing, right. This is. We just keep adding more and more scale. And it's certainly not the only Ballard story to use these tropes. The, you know, the. The megalopolis, right. It's just vast cityscape that seem unnavigable and incomprehensible. It's not the only one that uses tropes of, you know, rampant overpopulation, right. To the. To the point where there's literally no space left on the earth. And so there was something about the. The seemingly monstrous global scale of modern society that haunted Ballard. But in shifting to the concentration city, right. Of course, it might call to mind a concentration camp. You can think of the city as essentially being a large one in that story. There are other details that sort of underline that interpretation. The slums he mentions are periodically sealed off and gassed when the population becomes uncontrollable. And perhaps therefore, buildup kind of underlines the connection to the future, the concentrations that he also underlines connection to the horrors of the very recent. At the time he was writing the story past to the modern world. And I do think that's important if we want to understand what dystopian writers do. They do present us with images of the future. But this can also lead us down the wrong path. When we think about what's important or insightful or enduring about dystopian works, sometimes it becomes this sort of parlor game of, you know, who was the most prescient, who predicted with the most foresight, right down to the sort of technological contrivances deployed in the novels or other sort of detail. And I think that can be fun and sometimes it can even be enlightening. But dystopian writers are never just trying to predict the future. And I think thinking of it as a purely predictive or even mostly predictive enterprise sort of misses the point. Because first of all, the dystopian writer actually hopes that their prediction will be proven wrong. Right? They want to issue sort of a self preventing prophecy where we've been warned and then we, we stop it from happening. But the other point is that dystopia is always pointed at the the present and is always drawing out of the past. It often warns us about the reemergence of forms of hierarchy or slavery or oppression that we would prematurely relegate to history and think aren't possible anymore. So Orwell was haunted by this idea that what he compared to the, something like what he compared to the slave civilizations of antiquity, that was a phrase he used in numerous essays, was going to reemerge in the 20th century. Margaret Atwood, whenever I've seen her write or talk about the Handmaid's Tale, always emphasizes that there's nothing in the book that hasn't been done to women at some point in history or isn't being done to women at somewhere in the world right now. Right? And so dystopian writers do want us to think about where things are headed. But this is of course to hold a mirror to the present, because all of the tendencies that would lead us to the future have to be tendencies that run through the present and extend into the past. And so it's that sort of dual lens of prophecy which faces toward the future, but satire or social critique which faces more toward the present, that makes Dystopia interesting and insightful lens of political thought. @blinds.com, it's not just about window treatments. It's about you, your style, your space, your way.
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- [31:48]
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Not available in all states. Thanks for taking us down that path. I was thinking about Ballard fandom that you refer to as him being the most prescient of SF writers. You draw on thinkers such as, and excuse my pronunciation, Botichi Taylor, Riker Castoriadis. In your broader framing of political imaginaries, how do their ideas help illuminate the tensions between our inherited visions of the future and the competing imaginaries shaping political landscapes today?
- [32:31]
A
So, Paul Ricord, Cornelius Castoriadis, but very influential philosophers, the second part of the 20th century. Castoriadis coming out of a Marxist tradition, but giving it more attention to the role of the creative imagination in a way that kind of displays the influence of psychoanalysis. Ricoer comes out of the conventions of thermonetics, philosophers like Heidegger and Gadamer, who see us as people who are, you know, fundamentally concerned with interpreting the world that we live in, making meaning out of it. Right. And Charles Taylor is at this point very well established and influential philosopher, the more slightly more recent vintage than either Rico or Castoriada, but who has extended some of those lines of inquiry and thinking about the modern age. Tiafa Tizi is a, you know, she's a more contemporary political thinker, but one who's done a lot of the the legwork and sort of synthesizing ideas from those three thinkers and their fellow travelers to give us a more composite theory of the political imagination or of political imaginaries. And she's certainly not alone in that work. Alison de Queen, whose work on the apocalyptic imagination I drawn in the book, is someone else who's contributed really extensively to this conversation about the political imaginary. Mihaila Sabour, Luke has a great book about it. Abshalom Schwartz is doing good work on this topic. So just shouting out some of my fellow travelers, because there aren't a lot of political theorists who work on political imagination. It's sort of a. A niche subject. But, you know, we're, we're mighty though, though few and I. If anyone who's listening cares to check out or takes the time to chow out any of those scholars work, I'll be very satisfied that you spent your time there, you know, after you've read Fear the Future, of course. But what all of these folks together, the classic thinkers and their contemporary successors offer is a theory of the imagination as a constitutive feature of our shared political Life. They help us to see the extent to which the imagination is a backdrop that we collectively inhabit. You know, we have expectations about what other people will do, what will happen in the near and far future that we're not even always articulate about. If, if, if you asked me to explain them in words, I might not be able to, but I still kind of maneuver through the world based on this kind of composite imagination. And specifically with dystopia, I think what this helps us to see is that the dystopian imagination is less about the brilliance or insight, you know, a specific writer or artist, and more reflective of the way that societies and political meanings make communities, make meaning together. And I think this is true of the imagination more broadly in these accounts as well as the specific dystopian imaginary. It's not, you know, an idea of imagination as kind of romantic genius. It's something that we're all doing as kind of meaning making beings. And what I want to add to that conversation about the political imagination is the extent to which the imagination of the future specifically structures our political landscape. Because that isn't emphasized so strongly in the work just discussed with the possible, you know, exception, I would say, for McQueen's book about apocalyptic imaginaries. How does the future become so fraught with anxiety? Right. That's one of the questions that I want to answer. And that is fundamentally a question about the imagination. One of the specific anxieties that interests me is what the historian Jenny Anderson, who's likely kind of a historian of the future, calls the idea of a non future, which is the future as a void of possibility, pure repetition, complete control, a desert of spontaneity or event. And this is one of the existential concerns provoked in a lot of conversations about artificial intelligence. For example, this idea that humanity would surrender agency to machine systems entirely. Like in Isaac Asimov's story the last question, where we have this artificial intelligence standing alone in an empty but solved universe. Right? All questions have been answered, but there's no one to appreciate the answer anymore. And so I think that's a good way to think about what a non future would look like. But it all does tie back to this way that we negotiate our political world through imaginative constructs, through meanings, through symbol, through narrative. And for me, it's particularly the imagination of the future or the non future that I wanted to unpack using that framework of the political imagination.
- [37:02]
B
Hey. Well, your chapter one is titled the Modern Space of Possibilities. Why is it central to understanding your narrative?
- [37:12]
A
So space of possibilities is one of my terms of art. And I use it to describe this range of futures which are imagined or even just imaginable at any given time. The German theorist Reinhard Kasalek uses a similar idea. He calls it a horizon of expectations. And it doesn't use it in exactly the way that I use base of possibilities, but they are cognates in a way. I think I initially came across Kasalek's name and ideas in, like a footnote in a Habermach essay. But I took a deeper dive because I saw the resemblance there. And I think it's worth mentioning because there is some fascinating work going on in the arena of what we call historical futures or histories of the future that channels Kiselle's program, some of which I discussed in the introduction and conclusion of the book. And so space of possibilities, then, to be brief, is a term that I found really helpful for telling a history of the future. What did people at X point in time think was possible or probable or impossible, and how did they make those negotiations? My argument is the space of possibilities was fairly narrow. For most of human history, people didn't really expect society to change in its fundamental structure or for people to change in their fundamental psychology. And there wasn't much reason to expect those kinds of changes because change on that scale was rare. And when it did happen, and when a civilization collapsed, it often resulted from these accidents of history and not really from, you know, changes that humanity or groups of human beings intentionally introduced into the world. Now, in modernity, which is to say, in the world that emerges with the Reformation, the scientific revolution, the outlook of the Renaissance humanist, and later the enlightener, a world of political revolution, of industrial revolution, of capitalism. Right now, society becomes something quite dynamic. It's changing quickly, constantly even. And so you can adopt this perspective where we now look at the presentation as the point of transition to a future society that we can expect to be radically different from the society of the present. In fact, it's the idea that the future would be at all like the world we inhabit that starts to become implausible. And so this is what I call the modern sense of futility. The other dimension that I emphasize is mastery, or what I call the project of mastery. This naming, the idea that we in the modern world believe we drive the types of changes that lead us to the future, you know, kind of collectively, sometimes haphazardly, not. Not necessarily in a planned or intentional way, but, you know, we at least have the potential to do that. And you see this in the Utopian socialists, right. You see this in progressive thinkers, people like St. Simone, Conder, State, Comte. Right. These are all philosophers. You've seen a disorderly transition happening in the modern world, but also believe that if we really reason our way through it and organize our social and political action accordingly, we can make this a conscious transition. I mean, in its own way. Though he points less to a kind of series of reforms than to political revolution. Marx makes a similar point. Right. The. The modern world is alienating because we don't really understand the historical changes that are going on around us, but we can become conscious of them and sort of see control once again. So ultimately, what this adds up is to is a perspective that says not just that the world of tomorrow is going to be different, which is, I think, a radically different idea than existed for most of human history, but also that we can make a world of tomorrow. We can decide what we want that world to be and put it into action. That alone, I think, is an important enough fulcrum point in the history of ideas that it has to be emphasize, though other scholars, well before me, have, have discussed aspects of that transformation. But I do think you have to understand that historical pivot to understand how dystopia emerges. Right, and why we fear dystopia. You have to understand how the future becomes so open that it can be a site of possibility, but also of profound anxiety.
- [41:19]
B
You trace how Enlightenment optimism from writers like Mercier gave way to more anxious and ominous visions of the early 20th century. You've talked a bit about this already in terms of what changed the way intellectuals start imagining the future. So how did Mercier's land 2440 and Zamyatan's we serve as bookends for this shift. And why do you choose them as kind of archetypal expressions of their representative eras?
- [41:56]
A
Sure. So Mercier's book is important because it's first well known or very successful book. It was a bestseller of its age. It went through multiple printings which deposited the utopian society in the future. And this really had not been done before now. We didn't. We hadn't gotten to H.G. wells and the idea of the time machine yet. So Mercer uses the very. It did this sort of Rip Van Winkle device of someone who just takes a really long nap and wakes up in the future. But it allowed him to use this device where we could then see a future society where essentially all the dreams of the Enlightenment had come true. No slaves, no kings, no priests, no poverty. Science and morality kind of bolstered through the arts and basically taking all of those hopes of the Enlightenment era and imagining a society where they had been enacted. But by saying that that was what the world of the future would be like, right. Mercer was doing something subtly different from what his predecessors in the realm of utopian literature had done. And he did this by by channeling progressive thinkers like Chigot, like Condorcet, who thought they had discovered, you know, historical laws of, of progress, right? And then saying, well, what happens if we follow those laws further and we extrapolate from it? But you know, utopian speculation, unlike dystopia, is not modern. It has a very long history going back to the ancient world. But, you know, in, in Plato's Republic, the Calipolis, right, the beautiful city, is something that Plato has his interlocutors construct through conversation in Utopia, which coined the term Utopia both as the good place but also as no place. Sir Thomas More has it on an island that we discover somewhere else in the world. So utopia is displaced in thought or in space, but it's, it's not something that lies ahead of us in the future that we will achieve in historical time. It's more of a heuristic that lets us reflect on ourselves in our societies. And in fact, both Plato and more in the Republic and in Utopia have moments that are sort of self reflexive about the fact that this is probably not a possible or achievable or maybe even an entirely desirable way of organizing society. But the experiment of thinking it through and the imaginative encounter with the utopian world teaches us something about what's possible for us as individuals or as members of societies, right? Mercier is doing something different when he says Utopia is something that if we keep going, if we keep making the kinds of reforms we're making now and the kinds of progress we're making now channel our energies into political revolution. Because though he was a more moderate participant and this sort of critic of Robespierre, Al Mercier, was a supporter of the French Revolution, right? There was a sense that the world was ours to make and we could actually create this better future and we could get there. And so Utopia now lay ahead in time. Some studies of utopian thought and literature talk about this is a shift from Utopia to Ukronia, right? Suddenly the good place is the good time, but we can actually get there. And I think that's a very different way of thinking about Utopia, where it becomes something that through historical change and political action, we might actually achieve. Now, on the other hand, we gives us our first fully formed dystopian novel. It's not the very first dystopia story. We have stories by Wells, by Ian Forrester, by Jeff London and other writers that give us some of the key architecture of dystopian stories about fascism or technocracy. But we really does synthesize it into a novelistic form. It irons out the kind of narrative structure of the dystopian novels that writers like Huxley and Orwell and Ayn Rand and Kurt Vonnegut will all use in their own later dystopian novels. And it does so also with a kind of, you know, literary panache that I think some of its successors kind of lack, that are more, you know, these are more didactic message novels. There's a real sense of poetry and a very modernistic writing style in Zametin's novel that I think makes it also a slightly more exciting piece of literature than some of its successors that are more concerned with political argumentation and just kind of take the shell of the dystopian novel and deposit it. By the time we get to Zamitin now, we've seen the full arc from imagining the future as the dream of the Enlightenment come true to this nightmare that still has one very important thing in common with. With Mercier's novel, which is that it heralds the triumph in some distorted form of reason. Reason must prevail, we're told at the end of the book. This is a society that is dehumanizing, that is oppressive, that is totalitarian, it is in some way rational. But in what sense could that possibly be true is one of the things the book asks us to consider. So what happened in the interim between them? Well, that's mostly what the first chapter of the book is about. Let me start by saying what didn't happen, because I do think it's important to understanding the read on dystopia that my book presents. The one version of events is that the rise of dystopia is essentially a reaction to the World wars, to totalitarianism, to the Holocaust, to all those catastrophes of the 20th century I mentioned earlier. And I do think there's some truth to that insofar as it has helps us to understand kind of how dystopia went viral in the post war world. But I don't think it's an entirely satisfying explanation either, because as I said, we find our earliest dystopian writings in work that H.G. wells did in the 1890s and then in the first decade of the 20th century. There's more from Welles. There's the Iron Heel by Jack London, which depicts a kind of fascist oligarchy in the United States. There's machine stops by E.M. forster, where we're all kind of absorbed into this planetary machine kind of technological convenience. And this predates, you know, the emergence of fascism in Europe and predates the First World War. Even we Huxley's Brave New World, these are novels of the interwar period. So even if we're just thinking of dystopian literature and not the wider landscape of sort of futurisms and future anxieties and political thought, we can see that was already something awry before, you know, the events of the, you know, the 1930s and 1940s arguably kind of dealt the death blow to utopia and really put fuel on the dystopian fires. So what did happen? A great deal. And I don't think the story that I tell in my book is by any means comprehensive, but I can point to what I think are two important changes, both of which speak to a crisis in modernity's self understanding. And they have to do with these two vectors I mentioned early of futurity and mastery with respect to the first. In a post Darwinian world, right? One where doctrines of historical law or teleology or divine providence can no longer sustain ideas about inevitable progress as it occurred at the zenith of the Enlightenment, the future is now undetermined, right? We have dynamism, but we don't necessarily have directionality. It could go anywhere, all these social, technological and political changes that are afoot. So in that part of the book I look at writers like Nietzsche and like Wells who depict the future as a site of uncertainty, right? There's possibilities for decline as well as transcendence, for dystopia as well as utopia. And there's a real sense of confronting the unknown, of confronting contingency there with respect to the project of mastery, which is where most of the dystopian writing kind of derives its specific contents. For these future scenarios, we see this kind of post romantic, sometimes quite reactionary vision of how what's called progress, particularly with respects to technology and technique, mechanization, calculation, control, will eventually backfire on us. We will ourselves become the subject of these systems of control. And you see these various expressions of the anxiety. Human beings are reduced to a number, reduced to a cog in the machine, treated like, you know, an animal in a herd. These are all different ways of describing a sense of dehumanization that emerges from our own attempts to plan and control and predict the world that we live in. And that helps us understand then how we end up with something like Zombietan's we or Max Weber's intonations of the bureaucratic society, where on the one hand the world is rational, but on the other hand it's a nightmare. So Ballard telling us about this marriage of reason and nightmare, I think that's really where those pieces click together.
- [50:34]
B
I think we're well into your second chapter with all that. You've titled that Utopia and its negative. You note that many post war liberal theorists treated utopianism as a dangerous enabler of totalitarianism. What do you feel are the limits of that critique?
- [50:56]
A
Right. So Certainly in the 20th century, post war world dystopia goes from being, you know, perhaps a more niche concern to, or anxiety, truly the default way of thinking about the future and where it's headed. And I think part of why that happens is that so many events in the world seem to confirm the trajectories that writers like Zombutin and Huxley and Orwell predicted and laid out in their works. But also at the same time, this sort of disqualification of the utopian imagination or project, it comes to look naive at best and dangerous at work, according to the post war liberal critics of utopian projects. Right. And a lot of ways, if you look at what writers like Isaiah Berlin were writing at the time, but Jacob Talman were writing at the time and some of their successors as well, people like Lesik Kolakowski and Arthur Kessler kind of speak to the disillusion with the Russian Revolution. Right. I think for many of these writers, the saga of the Russian revolution and how it kind of hurdles into the Stalinist terror, Right. Which Zombie Team sort of wrote at the outset, that process eventually had to ask Stalin for permission to leave the Soviet Union. We was one of the first novels to be suppressed by the Soviet censors. There's this sort of Leninist orthodoxy about how art needed to serve essentially as propaganda. Zombie Team was interested in playing that game. Right. So there's also parts that are statutorizing the imposition of these Taylorist models of scientific management on the working class, Right. In post revolutionary Russia, where the very types of labor that Marx had pointed to as sort of a hallmarks of alienation were now being sort of foisted on the people in this presumably communist utopia. Right. And so then that's before we even really get to the Great Purges and the real kind of catastrophic moments in Stalin's reign. But I think that for a lot of the liberal thinkers of that era, as well as for conservative critics, as well as for some of these chastened socialists or communists, the Russian Revolution and the Stalinist terrorism is playing a role in their political argument sort of similar to, to what the French Revolution and its reign of terror played in, you know, the kind of Burkean conservative skepticism towards revolution and transformative politics. They eventually see this as a cautionary tale about when we try to envision a utopian world, when we try to transform the social world and human nature entirely, when we want to foist a blueprint of perfection or the new man on society, that what we end up with is terror because it requires that we sweep away the old world entirely. And it also creates a logic of ultimate ends where almost anything can be justified. Because if what you're really doing is turning the page to the final chapter of human history where we flourish on indefinitely, then it seems any horror or cost in the name of that transition, you know, can be justified. This is, you know, there's also a point that critics like Karl Popper in the Open Society Enemy frame not from these different quadrants of political thought. You do see a consensus that utopianism has proven itself to be a dangerous enabler of totalitarianism. And they see that, see that as a sort of insol, insoluble link. And it leads in most of these cases to a rejection of transformative politics, to a skepticism of revolutionary movements, either as they might possibly manifest themselves, you know, sort of within the kind of capitalist industrial democracies. I would think also a story that I don't really explore in much depth in my book, but which other theorists have, have, have spelled out more clearly. Many of these thinkers are also quite skeptical of this sort of anti colonial revolution that are going on in Asia and Africa, but, but essentially revolutionary politics are tossed out with utopianism, right? It's, it's not just the well reasoned warning that try to impose some totalizing plan on reality will lead us astray, but really that any effort to transform the social world now needs to be look at, looked at askance and we need to lower our sights, lower our ambitions, or behind all of that, what I take to be the kind of aura point of the, the anti utopian post war constellation is a skepticism of the political imagination. Essentially an idea that the political imagination of this violence to reality and it leads us to irrationality. And while I think that can happen particularly I think it's a problem that I would associate more strongly with the kind of apocalyptic imagination, or what Gregory Claes, the formidable scholar of utopian dystopia, calls political religions. I don't agree that this is true of all political imaginaries, kind of in terms of my own thinking, but in terms of the historical point, the record that I wanted to set straight in that chapter is that I don't really think this is the point that dystopian writers were making. You see very clearly, for example, Isaiah Berlin cites We in Frame the world as 1984 as essentially kind of confirming his polemic against the utopian imagination. These are books that tell us to give up on utopia because it's too dangerous of an idea. But actually, I think if you look the sort of wider bodies of work from writers like Zomitin or Huxley or even the contents of 1984 itself, I don't think this exactly fits what's going on there. And so I try to argue that dystopias are actually in some ways a defense of the political imagination and can exercise their own kind of stewardship over the utopian imagination, because it is the, the atrophy of the political imagination and the shutting off of, of any hope or possibility for a better future that leads us into the kind of sealed world of dystopia. And so I think that perhaps as kind of imaginative and speculative enterprises that emit more of, you know, paradox and ambiguity than, you know, analytic philosophy does, dystopian literature can play a dual role in sort of cautioning this against the extremes of utopianism and certainly against the hubris of, of specific utopian projects, but while also mounting its own kind of defense that, that there's an essence, a constructive essence to the utopian imagination that can survive that skepticism. And in fact, that part of what we do when we reject the false utopias of, you know, of technocracy or totalitarianism is actually to try to safeguard the real and powerful essence of, of a utopian outlook and a utopian vision of our political potential. And so I don't see, you know, Orwell or Huxley as being in the main anti utopian thinkers. So I try to create some distance there between what's going on in their bodies of work and the ends to which the sort of post war liberal constellation wants to kind of appropriate and deploy those works. Running a business comes with a lot of what ifs, but luckily there's a simple answer to them. Shopify, it's the commerce platform behind millions of businesses including Thrive Cosmetics and Momofuku. And it'll help you with everything you need. From website design and marketing to boosting sales and expanding operations. Shopify can get the job done and make your dream a reality. 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- [59:16]
B
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A
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- [59:37]
B
Excludes Massachusetts There's a version of Drowned World by Ballard and Robert McFarland writes the introduction to it and he opens with something like in Ballard's early novels, he destroys the world in three different ways and then goes on to say that he was interviewed in the 1970s and he argued the message that I was trying to convey. There was a transformative one. I mentioned that because you had mentioned that transformative quote quality here. I think, as you say, that applies to Huxley and Orwell's work as well, and perhaps that's overlooked in the rush to judgment as we know it. So let me ask if Dystopia is a dark mirror for the present, what kind of reflections from the novels that you've talked about here feel most urgent for for us now?
- [60:33]
A
Do you think there's a lot to choose from when we think about our present in terms of, you know, ominous forecast and deeply concerning trajectories in our political and technological and economic landscapes? One of the writers who I've spent the most time with in working on the book and since then is Orwell himself. And I I do hope once I've gotten a little more clear about what I want to add, you know, the vast, vast literature on Orwell that there might even be a sort of second book focusing more specifically on. On Orwell's political thought and specifically his sort of psychopathology of politics. Orwell's vocabulary for talking about the political trends of the 1940s takes on a distinctively psychological tone. One might even say psychoanalytic, though I hesitate to use those terms because I don't see a lot of evidence, at least in terms of the scholarship I've investigated so far, that Orwell had much interest in Freud or Freudianism or this sort of earlier works in the kind of Freudo Marxist tradition which he would have had at least some opportunity to read things like write the psychological aspects of Fascism or Early from or something like that. And certainly there are a lot of parallels in those. But you find Orwell using the. The vocabulary of sadism and masochism and schizophrenia to describe the age that he lives in. And. And he argued that irrational forces are driving our politics and that we have to understand that much of what's moving the political world in the directions that it's going in which to him was toward hierarchy, toward oligarchy, toward totalitarianism, was in some way not something we could grasp if we just focused on what people rationally want. I think in that warning there's something that speaks to our time and to the way that we seem to be losing our grip on reality. On the one hand, you know, sort of kind of politics of conspiracies and apocalyptic confrontation that we see going on at the same time. AI and other emergent technologies that make it harder for us to even grasp what's real. And I think that the kind of Orwellian diagnosis speaks to that right in 1984 is really different from a lot of the earlier dystopias, with the exception of London's the Iron Heel, which Orwell was a big admirer of in this regard. And that it's not really warning us against a false utopia and the way that Brave New World is. And at least to some extent we is. And, you know, Forrester's Machine Stop certainly do. These are novels that depict what the great political theorist George Kato calls false heaven. But he notes that by contrast, 1984 is a real hell. And there's not even really the pretense of creating a perfect society, you know, for the masses. At the end of the book, o', Brien, the Party inquisitor, sort of taunts Winston when he offers this explanation, right, that. That humanity was forced to make a choice between freedom and happiness, and the party chose Happiness. And, and o' Brien just thinks this is ridiculous. He says, look at the world we created. Who, who, who's happy here? Even the members of the party are driving themselves insane and tormenting themselves. The masses are oppressed. Right. Nobody even believes at a superficial level that this is a perfect society. In fact, it's one that's designed to maximize persecution and pain. Right. And so there's really no rational order to that other than a kind of pursuit of domination almost as an end in itself. And that possibility, while hyperbolic, of course, in the context of the dystopian novel. No, I, I'm less concerned about the hazards of kind of well intentioned social engineering than I am about the emergence, particularly on the, the far right of, of movements that seem to indulge in cruelty against, you know, selected others and marginalized population that want to create ethnonationalist bunkers and fight against what they see as this kind of invasion by refugee or immigrant. And it does seem to be moving more towards this kind of establishment of hierarchy through, through pain and political repression, rather than the kind of slick, painless world of, you know, a Huxley and Brave New World type dystopia. But, you know, beyond that, I think Orwell had an insight that he did not himself believe in what he called the iron law of oligarchy. He associated that with his frequent nemesis, James Burnham. He. This kind of realist view of history where societies inevitably encode some kind of hierarchy or domination. He didn't think that was true. He thought the point of the socialist movement, and really the point of every slave revolt going back to the ancient world, was that you could create a world where nobody had to be dominated or enslaved. And that particularly in the modern world, there was no longer any reason to organize societies that way. And so we thought we had to kind of try to break those chains and that holding on to the possibility of a society of equality and humanity was important. So I take that to be a very timely warning. But now let me say just conversely where I do think, you know, maybe the kind of Huxley inside of the coin has a little bit more purchase today, I do think we, if we don't see genuine utopians in say, Washington D.C. where I think again, we see a kind of far right apocalypticism manifesting itself, we do have sincere utopian, or at least purportedly sincere utopian in Silicon Valley, and they of course are increasingly making inroads in dc. We have this kind of uneasy alliance right now between the tech oligarchs and the more kind of populist far right. And they butt heads. Right. You know, Steve Bannon and Elon Musk, from what I can tell, you know, kind of hated each other and were kind of perpetually competing for President Trump's sort of attention and political priority toward, toward their project. So, so certainly the truce there is an unstable one and it speaks to differences in their political projects. But you do have people, you know, like Musk, like Mark Andreessen and some of these other big movers and shakers in the Silicon Valley world who believe that what they're doing in pursuing more powerful artificial intelligence and pursuing frontiers of, you know, space colonization, Bezos and the construction of virtual worlds. Alo Zuckerberg. Right. These are people who think they're creating the human future where they think will, will flourish. And I, and I admit sometimes, I'm not really sure how scary seem to take all of that. Sometimes I think this is kind of a veneer, of a kind of eschatological justification for what is ultimately the same kind of oligarchic politics, you know, that gave rise to the progressive movement in the last century. Right. Are these guys just the oil barons, the field barons of the 21st century, and they dress it up in space age mythology because it makes it sound less self serving? On some days, I think that's true in other days. But I do think there also are true believers in Silicon Valley who really do think we're on the cusp of an artificial, artificial general intelligence or super intelligence, and that it's going to be a game changer for human history. And I do think we want to be skeptical of, of, of these people and their visions of utopia, not because I think we need to be skeptical of all utopianism, but on the one hand, I would say utopianism as it speaks to me in its most constructive guises, is ultimately a social and political ideal. It's an ideal of human flourishing and equality. It's not a technological ideal. And when you, and when you sublimate politics to technology, then you end up producing, you know, a kind of techno authoritarianism. And I do see a tendency that is very strongly written into the world, whether you look at the role of surveillance technology in chilling dissent in countries like China, or whether you look at the very high tech infrastructure of repression that Palantir is helping ICE build in the United States right now. And so I do think there's a worrying interface of technology and reactionary politics there where these groups don't always see eye to eye on the broader vision or what they want. But there's some willingness to collaborate in the interspecies where technology produces new forms of hierarchy and regimentation. And I really think we ought to resist that and be very skeptical of anyone who tells us that this is just the transition to this perfect world of tomorrow that they've seen for us. And to use the language that you used in your introduction, I think we should always be very skeptical of people who want to make the future for us rather than with us, right. Who say, I've already planned the perfect utopia, I've already have the vision, and you're just kind of along for the ride. Because the people building these artificial intelligences, they don't want public oversight or control. They're moving faster than the public can keep up. And they don't see these as being technologies that should be publicly owned or publicly operated. They see them as things that are vehicles for private profit and the laundering of corporate influence. And I just think that's something where we ought to be very cautious because anyone who is even remotely sincerely well intentioned about creating a utopian world would have to see it as something that we all participate in, in the envisioning and construction of together, right? You don't engineer a utopia and then tell everyone else to live in it like they're, you know, their characters in your, your SimCity game. You, you, you do that work in a spirit of collective action and self determination. And so to me, I would say thinking about the kind of dystopian frontiers of things like AI, I'm less concerned about, you know, rogue superintelligence and things like that, partially because I just think the, the tech isn't living up to the hype. Certainly the LLM approach doesn't seem like it's ever going to create anything like that. But what I work to take to be a more plausible fear is a kind of techno oligarchy or techno authoritarianism where we have extreme centralization of power and resources under very few people. And it's, it's much more of, what haunts me, I would say is much more of a near future kind of terrain of technological repression and manipulation as opposed to some far future where like the AI has become autonomous and you know, traps us in the Matrix or something like that.
- [71:03]
B
Your tech pro view of political reality, and I like the, the sim city analogy there reminds me a bit of the Truman Show. And in your book you have some references to Dave Eggers and the Circle and that comes to mind as well, but also references to Zuboff the Surveillance state seems quite apt. You've written about the tension between expertise as a public good and as a source of democratic alienation. How might fiction, especially speculative narratives like we've been talking about, help us to imagine alternatives to both technocratic paternalism and populist rejection of expertise? You've written about expertise and also, I guess, more to the point here, do you see works like Pomeraza's this Is Not Propaganda? He's got a couple books along those lines as complementary to dystopian fiction in terms of diagnosing the kinds of informational systems that make technocracy either tolerable or intolerable.
- [72:17]
A
Sure. So a great set of questions and certainly one important observation, particularly if we want to. Palmer, who's done a lot of fascinating analysis on Russia and other authoritarian contexts, is that there are different ways of politically deploying expertise, and they can be more democratic, they can be more technocratic, they can be more authoritarian. The piece you're alluding to, the Trouble with Technocracy, which was a piece that I eventually published with the Boston Review, really tried to get clear about what technocracy really is and what kind of danger it presents to democracy. Now, at the time that I worked on that piece, I. I thought it was something of an oversight because technocracy is one of the dystopian paradigms I engage with in the novel. And I felt that it still had an afterlife that was relevant to our era, but I felt that it was also not something political theorists really talked about. People were very concerned about oligarchy, and they're very concerned about authoritarianism, but technocracy was sort of kept on the back burner. Now, why is that? On the one hand, I think there are a lot of people in academia and in the NGO sector. Yeah. Who are friendly to a technocracy. They may be kind of technocratically inclined themselves. The people with the most knowledge should have more influence. And certainly populism is wielded often as a pejorative by the political establishment, which, you know, authoritarian populism. I have a problem with that. Democratic, redistributive populisms, I don't. You know, I think these are actually important correctives to a political system that, left to its own devices, seems to gravitate towards oligarchy and elitism. So, you know, forced to choose technocracy versus populism. I'm certainly more on the populist side of things, though. I think they can also be mixed and matched in different ways. You know, there's been some scholarship on techno populism as a kind of political point. And actually what I gesture toward near the end of my ASEAN technocracy, something like a citizen's technocracy, where, where we have a democratic engagement, but it'd be still, in the end, processes of problem solving where developing knowledge as a shared collective resource and developing power as a shared collective resource, where there's kind of unified circuitry where we share knowledge and share power. And that's part of my vision of democracy inspired by, you know, writers like John Dewey and others of this sort of progressive era. But I thought it was necessary to say something about technocracy because when you look at the role of these kind of unaccountable bureaucratic aspects of our government, you know, it is something that I think needs to be scrutinized. And if you look more globally, how much power is wielded by organizations like say, you know, the IMF or the World bank, or how much, how much power does the European Central bank have? And how did, how did that determine the sort of redistributive programs in terms of how the Great Recession was responded to? Right. The program of austerity was in a lot of ways kind of imposed by unelected officials in the United States and in Europe. And there were real stakes to that in terms of distributive justice in the short term. But then I think the political aftermath has been tremendous because the inequalities that festered in the aftermath of the recession I think really laid the groundwork for not all of, but a great deal of the kind of authoritarian populist demagoguery that we've seen in Europe and the United States, among other contexts in the last decade. Right. You know, that, that was part of the, that festering wound was kind of where the rage that fueled the rise of, you know, figures like Trump was enabled in the first place. So how did we get there? And why, what, what kind of public oversight or public accountability might have posed an alternative? But, but I thought that was important to ask because it didn't seem like a lot of people were really interested in pushing that debate. Like I said, you have kind of pro technocratic thought and a lot of elite circles where they don't really see that as the problem and they think the, the kind of ignorant masses are the problem, especially with the right wing militating against the administrative state. And maybe they thought that this was to, should take up a kind of right wing trope, whereas I think there can be a kind of Progressive democratic critique of technocracy. And you know, that particularly after the COVID 19 pandemic, I think to be critical of expertise struck many people as just like insane, atavistic. What are you doing? The whole problem is that people won't listen to the experts. But you know, I think to cite a fellow traveler and some of this conversation, Bennett Pamek's book the Politics of Expertise, which concerns the interface between science and democracy, makes a lot of really smart points about, you know, without jumping all the way to some kind of Trumpist caricature of like Anthony Fauci is some kind of like, you know, mad scientist does press the critique that, you know, experts kind of over determined the response to the pandemic. And even where they were making, you know, prudential decisions, you know, they weren't necessarily clear about what the rationale was. They weren't always opaque about the justifications. Sometimes knowledge was withheld from the public in order to kind of engineer specific reactions. And I think that kind of instrumentalization of knowledge where you, you know, you withhold information because if people know too much, they won't act in accordance with your plan like that just should have no place in a democratic context. You know, you share the information and you make the argument for what people ought to do, but you don't try to manipulate people by withholding information so that they'll be more likely to do what you want or what you think is best. So, you know, I do think that the critique of technocracy is still important in those contexts, even when it is kind of benign or well intentioned. But now I think we're moving into this moment, as I was speaking earlier, where there is this kind of political nexus between Silicon Valley and Washington D.C. where we have not really even the rule of experts, but, but the role of, of techno oligarchs who think they're the, the visionaries of the next age of, you know, human progress, but in the meantime seem largely to be enriching themselves, to be embedding themselves more deeply in our political structure. I mean, Elon Musk taking up semi permanent residents of the White House for the first half of 2025 is the most visible example of that, that the way that, you know, Palantir is just hoovering up government contract after government contract under the Trump administration. There's something happening there that we really ought to keep our eyes on. And I think more than anything, we have to resist the temptation that because things like AI are complicated or climate change are complicated, and then, then you Know, the quote unquote masses can't participate in any kind of political self determination with respect to these issues because I think that overstate expertise of technocrats. There is a lot that they don't know or can't reach accurate judgments or agreement about either. When it comes to predicting the outcomes of policies, the experts are often entirely wrong. Academic economists have an awful track record of predicting recessions and depression. They basically never see them coming. And you know, then they can tell us after they happen, they give their concepts why they happen. PhD in economics should make economic policy. PhDs in computer science should make our AI policy. And PhDs environmental science should make our climate policy. Like you know, all those people should have influence where their expertise is relevant, no doubt. But it can't be a substitute for a democratic process. We need to avoid group think, we need to avoid insularity and ultimately the criteria of policy, as long as you want to live in a democracy, has to be democratic legitimacy, not expert endorsement. Right? So if experts do believe strongly they know what's best, right? Programmatically speaking, prescriptively speaking, then it's up to them to make the case to the people. One of the things Pavak points out in her book is that there is often this kind of circular argument that essentially good policy is what the experts say it is. And if people aren't persuaded, then this is kind of ipso facto proof that they should be excluded from the process of policy formation. But, but if you actually take democracy seriously, then you can't think about it that way. It has to be the, the other way around. And the people might, might not agree with, you know, that we should develop AI or autonomous web weapon systems. They might not agree with the, the mass production of genetically modified organisms or you know, their use in food products. And even if some experts think that irrational or based on a poor understanding of this science, then we, we can't, that's not sufficient reason to short circuit a real process of democratic, you know, debate and deliberation and you know, part of what's at stake to me in it. And again, this is kind of falling off of the, the sort of Duan lens is that I think that, you know, the, the mythology of public, mass public ignorance becomes self, self fulfilling, right? If, if you exclude people from the process, if you say don't think about the affairs of your community, all you really need to do is go to work and like buy things, then that's all people will be doing, right? I, I think that if you give people stakes and decision making. If you encourage them to share knowledge and encourage them to participate, then then that becomes a virtuous cycle and we need to figure out how to kind of set some of those emotions without necessarily assuming that everybody wants to be, you know, a citizen activist or live, you know, the political life in the really strong way like the ancient Greeks are thought to have or like that Arendt envisioned. Right. You know, some people probably do care less about that kind of thing, and we have to be realistic about that as well. But I do see myself as really being on the side of democracy, though, even if we need to kind of stretch our imagination in terms of what the democracy of the future might look like. Hablas espanol Spritz du dzoitsk. If you used Babbel, you would. Babbel's conversation based techniques teach teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the real world. With lessons handcrafted by over 200 language experts and voiced by real native speakers, Babbel is like having a private tutor in your pocket. Start speaking with Babbel today. Get up to 55% off your Babbel subscription right now at Babbel.com Spotify spelled B A B-B-E-L.com Spotify rules and restrictions may apply.
- [82:36]
B
Well, there is some, certainly a tension there between an active citizen along the lines you were referring to there and this kind of indifference that may have in sometimes in the back of my mind, I feel like how do we end up with a Trump administration? If you get enough indifference out there, people don't actually engage or bother to vote. You know, that's speculation is probably not.
- [83:06]
A
I think you're on with something there. And, and actually this ties back to something you asked in the lead in about technocracy, about Pomerentsev and his diagnosis of this war against reality. Right. And the idea that the experts know its best. There's a really fascinating study that I like close to the end of the book and start speaking about how Putin's form of authoritarianism fits into this dystopian present. And the study asks whether, you know, Russian support for the war against Ukraine should be attributed to imperialist ideology. That is to say that people are true believers in this kind of greater Russia and it's sort of moral normative case to take over parts of the Ukraine or whether it's really a matter of depoliticization. Right. And their study finds that part of what you were describing. Right. This idea that they don't really know. It's too complicated. The experts and the bureaucrats say that this is what needs to be done, so they're just going to kind of stay out of it. It really is explains more of the phenomenon, which is more like quiescent than active support. And sure, you have your true believers, you have your ultra nationalists and people like that, but it may actually be a kind of low grade consent. Even with all the effort the Russian regime puts into manufacturing consent for this war and spreading propaganda in support of the war that a lot of people are still more indifferent to it than fanatically devoted to it. But that can still be a resource because as long as people aren't opposing it actively in large numbers, then it continues on. Pomerantsev is such an interesting figure in this context because his background, before he started writing about Russian propaganda, he actually produced reality television. And the key insight in his book about Russia is that, you know, Putin and its inner circle essentially script Russian politics with a kind of reality television program where there's a sort of opposition that's selected and amplified in house, whereas, you know, a loyal opposition that keeps its criticisms of Putin's regime within pretty narrow bounds. Whereas, you know, true critics, the volumes and people like that, you know, we know what happens to them. Right. And, and so it gives people the fantasy or, or appearance of debate democracy, you get to vote, right. But at the same time, there's really no meaningful democracy. It's kind of the appearance of it, a virtual, scripted kind of democratic debate. Conversely, if you look at the United States and it seems, if you take some of those insights and think about how they might map onto our media ecosystem, was it really any surprise that a reality television star worked his way to the White House? If you think about how much those mediums of political communication and, and, and reality entertainment have sort of converged into to one whole, certainly when we think about right now, this kind of opposition to concepts of objective truth and the sort of brazenness of propaganda where distorting reality works even when it's blatant and fraudulent, because it could be done at scale and speed to the point where there's no possibility of putting out the fires quickly enough. Right. And, and you have people who are obsessed with things like Pizzagate conspiracy or the QAnon conspiracies, right. And it just takes on a light of its own. And particularly when powerful people amplify those narratives, it really does feel like you can shake the grip of reality very easily, to the point where you have something like, you know, the January 6th insurrection based on just fraudulent, conspiratorial, baseless accusation that an election has been stolen. Right. And I do think that part of what's missing there, I would, I would echo the, the ideas of Hannah Arendt that that part, that part of the core issue there is that people are, are alienated from the common world. Right. We're all consuming media on our screen in isolation and then perhaps finding some pseudo community through, as we go down those rabbit holes, right. Alt, right. Message boards or these kind of radicalizing YouTube rabbit holes, right. And then that connects people to other people who share the same delusions. But we're no longer talking about a common reality that is subject to claims of truth or falsity. But that is one of the reasons why despite, I think a lot of people who think along these lines and agree with me that these are big problems might then wonder why the heck I would, I would put any confidence in democratic decision making. And again, I would just point out that one, I don't think the quote unquote, experts are immune to forms of dilution or propaganda themselves. And also that I think this core issue then is the loss or this kind of abeyance of a common world, of a real robust public theater for communication and deliberation. And so I do think that getting up on that project and just leaving people to lurk behind their, their phones and their computers and to, to suss out the truth by, by playing Internet detective, you know, that that's just going to lead to a world where we have even more people who are anti vaxxers and flat earthers and election denialists and all this other stuff like, you know, we can't give up on the democratic public because I think a lot of the problems that we have now are actually direct result of the desiccation of that public, of the desiccation of the media by corporate interests. And the more that we let those trends continue, I think the more irrational the world is going to look and the more our sort of collective grip on reality will falter.
- [88:39]
B
How does Habermas's warning. And now we're into this final leg of the book about the refutilization of the public sphere. Help us interpret societies that you discuss in Fear of the Future, where technological complexity and narrative overload seem to reshape the conditions for democratic discourse. Is there in this a fictional warning about the collapse of rational critical debate in technologically advanced democracies? And you've alluded to this, that we seem to be experiencing right now in the US today. Do you think the narrative form itself contributes to or resists this kind of collapse, or does it complicate the polarization in some way?
- [89:34]
A
Right. So Hamasu's ideas about the desiccation of the public sphere I think do have purchase. And the way he extended those ideas to think about, you know, the, the colonization of medias, of communication by corporate interests. Right. Commodification of communication. I think we live in a world where that's gone even further than what Habermas anticipated when he wrote about those back in the 1960. We live in a world where what matters is whether a story is true, it's how many clicks or shares or views it gets. Right. And all of this is done essentially to sell data to advertisers and, you know, allow them to be more efficient in the ways they kind of manipulate our attention span and our behavior. So it certainly, it's a worrying media environment and it is not necessarily in itself sufficient explanation for all of the, you know, the worrying political trends of our moment. But I do think it creates an arena in which they, they can flourish. And that's certainly concerning. But again, I wouldn't go so far as to say that narrative forms or imaginative forms are to blame for this. I think it just matters too much what the story is and what the imagination is deployed for. At bottom, I think imagination can be a tool for apprehending reality. You know, a story can help us understand the world we live in better sometimes even than just the straight facts, depending on what the, what the issue is. It's how we process the world. We're sort of storytelling animals. There's a lot of work in neuroscience psychology that shows that when we process information in narrative form, we remember it better. It, it appeals to our feelings and our affective apprehension of the world as much as to our cognitive apprehension of the world. Right. And it's often actually those social and emotional dispositions towards the world that really determine what we think and do. As, as much as we like to think of ourselves as brain driven, mind driven, rational creatures, a lot of the times we start with what we feel to be true, what people around us seem to think to be true, and we bend the facts backward to fit into that. And you know, having some awareness of that, this heuristics can maybe help us be on the lookout and not dilute ourselves excessively. But ultimately, I think, as I said at the beginning, in ways that are both enabling a possibility, in ways that are deeply concerning, we live in a world that is both real and imaginary, and where those interpenetrate. We live in a world of stories, we live in a world of images. And where those end in the real begins is always quite difficult to say. So ultimately, we. We do have to contend with the fact that while we process the political world through stories and through images, we still ultimately want to apprehend a shared reality. Right? We don't want to lose sight of the fact that we do inhabit the world together, that we are talking to each other, that there is some sense in which we're concerned about the truth, even if it's perspectival, and we see it from different vantage points, that there's something at stake in the meeting of those perspectives, rather than just a kind of endless positional warfare where this is my reality and that's your reality, and it becomes a kind of gladiator combat to impose your reality on the other side. And so I do think there is a core to our political world, that it's people like Habermas who had, you know, a kind of unfashionable confidence in the kind of rational functions of communication, you know, at a time when. When everyone else was really going all in on, you know, sort of postmodern subjectivism, et cetera. You know, Habermas took a stance that seemed a little bit more, you know, old fashioned. But I. But I think there's something to that. I think there's something to Arendt's ideas about working to build a world together and to point to a contemporary thinker who, I think in a different way has maybe spoken to some of these issues. I'm a big fan of Jenny Odell's book How to Do Nothing, which is about the attention economy. And the language she uses is that of context collapse versus context collection. And I think of if. I think if we think of this through a Habermasian lens of communicative action or an Arrentian lens of sort of public world building, you can kind of gather, I think, some similarities between those and what she calls context collection, because I think similar to what I was saying about, you know, we're all isolated behind our screens, being funneled down the TikTok rabbit hole on this or the YouTube rabbit hole on that. Seeing our algorithmically sorted news feeds, right? Part of what Odell offers is a solution inspired by. By regionalism, but, you know, by the idea that we need to think more about how we connect to our natural environment as well as to our social environments and communities and the people who we literally live close to and share space with. Right. We need to not let ourselves kind of dwell too far too extensively in this kind of disembodied displaced ether of just like the frictionless, seamless Internet, and instead think about, like, who. Who is around us? Who do we share physical space with? How do we talk to those people? Because these might be the people who, you know, are. Are voting the entirely different ways from how we vote. We see the world entirely differently for how we see it. And, and they're right there in front of us. And we can easily retreat behind our screens and just talk to the people who we like and who agree with us and who we've been sort of algorithmically sorted to get along with. But. But we really need to pay attention to physical space and community and, and think about what we can actually build together because rational politics does depend on us believing that there is a real world that we share together and inhabit together. And so, you know, we can, we can look to 20th century critics to try to get some insight onto that, or we can look to more recent writers. But I think there is a kind of convergence in viewpoints on, you know, on the importance of being intentional about how we inhabit and construct our social worlds. And particularly now with this just massive temptation and push really to move all of our existence into this, you know, just endless feed without boundaries or physical reference points. Right. Well, you know, I think that just pushes us further and further down into this, you know, vacuum of conspiracies and irrationalities and kind of in impossible polarization bit points.
- [96:20]
B
All. I like the, you know, the final push in terms of intention and I think your point about the attention economy, Jenny Odell, that would pair well, I think, with Richard Powers, the overstory in terms of how those two would work in terms of the bioregionalism and back to the intentionality. But we're well into this and I've taken up a lot of your time, and I want to circle back to the world of George Orwell's 1984, where a totalitarian state controls us through fear. You've talked a bit about Neil Postman, his amusing ourselves to death, but Postman has a number of books and he warned us that the real threat was more along the Huxley lines of Brave New World, where we're controlled by our love of entertainment, so to speak. Is Postman's thesis, do you think, a key to helping us understand why we might willingly give up our civic duty and cross critical thinking in exchange for this constant stream of amusement that you were alluding to there and that I was kind of alluding to earlier in terms of just indifference. Do you think Postman's thesis about the entertainment culture can help explain why cultural passivity can be as durable as political repression?
- [97:43]
A
Sure, I think that there's certainly still important insight there. Our technologies today are different. He was writing really a kind of classic 1980s polemic about television. But a lot of it applies really cleanly and directly all the way up to today in the sort of age of TikTok. I suppose there's some important differences that writers like Tubal, among others, had intimated about the role of sort of algorithms and data mining and things and really fragmenting and exploiting our attention spans to a kind of imprecision and totality that, you know, a television Advertiser in the 1980s never would have been able to dream of. But perhaps the outcomes are very similar in that our attention spans seem to be a kind of key battleground for political control. That being said, I think there are ways in which the Huxleyan scenarios and the Orwellian one overlap in a lot of ways. What happens when political cruelty becomes a kind of live streamed immersive entertainment? Look at the Twitter feeds or X now, excuse me, for the Department of Homeland Security and ICE and other political entities of our government. They share these hideous AI generated memes of, you know, Hispanic woman sobbing as she's being deported and, you know, use cagey Internet slang, you know, fuck around and find out to, to talk about it. They embraced the alligator Alcatraz with pictures of gators wearing ice hats again through, you know, Scotty AI slop graphics, which seems to be, as others have observed, kind of the dominant aesthetic of fascism today. And where you saw, I saw recently the epa, this kind of deathless Wendy Williams meme of, you know, she's the icon, she's the moment to talk about coal, that we're going to keep burning coal instead of moving to renewables. Right. So what is going on with all of it? You know, you have this essentially kind of mean spirited propaganda that's like, yes, we're going to make immigrants suffer, yes, we're going to violate people's rights, yes, we're going to continue burning coal and just to trigger the libs or whatever. And it is this kind of sadism in the way that Orwell described, indicative of things like the two minute hate, but. But it becomes a kind of mass entertainment or mass spectacle that you can memify and repost and reshare and I think that some of that is perhaps points to a way in which the kind of Orwellian diagnosis, the kind of thetomathochism is a political tendency that is very relevant to the politics with fascism. And maybe the more kind of Huxley and kind of mass media consumers critique have some fertile intersection, have. Have found some, some meeting ground. And certainly, you know, you could. There's other examples we could look to as well, the. The role of, of YouTube and now TikTok as kind of laboratories of radicalization, particularly among the young white male population. Right. There's. There is a way in which these technologies do not simply seek to pacify us, though they may have that outcome for some of their users. They can also be technologies of recruitment and incitement and radicalization that allow us to participate in the humiliation of others or the infliction of cruelty on others, and to feel like that something that reaffirms our place in the social hierarchy if we choose to participate in that. And I don't think it's exactly the same as just, oh, we, we hypnotize ourselves with these devices and just forget that there are any problems in the world. It seems to be something a bit darker than that.
- [101:39]
B
Yeah, no, good point. And I like the, I like the connection and the overlap that you bring up there. There's that whole thing about owning the libs, which is quite a theme in and of itself. But that's another. Another issue. If a listener picks up your book after hearing our conversation, what is one question you hope they'll keep asking themselves as they read?
- [102:03]
A
Maybe it's two questions. What now? What next? Right. The process of grappling with the profound problems and challenges and dire trajectories of our political landscape. Sort of evident and ongoing. But we have to keep asking ourselves, and I think this, the spirit of the dystopian imagination is to keep our eye on the future. But then, of course, this provokes maybe a third question, which is, what else? Right. Where can we go instead of dystopia? I don't necessarily suppose there's any really compelling utopian alternative to many of these darker trends that we've dwelled on in this conversation. But that doesn't mean that there aren't projects that people can invest themselves in that they may fall very short of utopia. They may not in any meaningful sense constitute an alternative or point to an easy path to abolish the oppressive structures that the dystopian imagination engages with or to reverse the dehumanizing tendencies that it depicts, but they do allow us to set other possibilities into motion. Right. We should seek out alternatives in the here and now and that and sometimes we may think about as bulwark building. It's simply trying to avert the worst case scenario. Right? What do we have to do to stop fascist takeover of our democratic institutions? Perhaps it would be more inspiring to envision an ideal democracy, but in the meantime, holding the line against the deterioration of our democratic institutions beyond what's already occurred is tusking up. Right? How do we resist that? Likewise with these discussions at the sort of. About the technological trajectories, right. Perhaps there's nothing you or I or the listener or reader can do to break the grit of, you know, these kind of extractive technologies on our attention spans and our media economies. But we can give them less of our attention and we can more importantly direct that time and effort into forms of association that are more rooted in space and place and time, in our, in our physical communities, in the sense that I referred to with reference to Odell. Right. And, and so I do think that we end on a question of, of what? What can we start building? What kind of world can we start building, making? And where would we start? You know, Hannah Arendt in all of her dark medications always came back to this idea that really the essence of human freedom was our ability to start something new, that there was always the possibility for new beginnings. And so I suppose for a reader who looks out at the world and sees a landscape of dystopias and the making and perhaps no real meaningful political process project in which they feel they can invest themselves as an alternative, we can ask ourselves what, what can we start to make instead? What does that look like in my community? What can I join? What can I contribute to? Where can I put my energies? And even if some of those things we might join a, a political organization, a community organization, some kind of ecological endeavor, right. They, they might look marginal, they might not seem important, they may not seem like sufficient, you know, centers of gravity that, that really much will change. At least then some alternative ways of doing things can be incubated, different modes of thought association and political action. And then those may serve us well in the years ahead. Right? And so part of what we do when we act is thinking about politically, that is to say, is to think about what, which of our actions will have the impact that we want in terms of averting bad tendencies and manifesting good ones in the here and now. But I also think we can take this approach suggested by the dystopian imaginary. And think of what we're doing is almost building a capsule for the future, right? In 1984, the beginning of the novel Winston's Rebellion begins with his writing in his diary, a message to the future, right? He's. He's trying to connect with the next generation, or perhaps the next, next, next, next, next generation, someone who can read and understand and sort of carry on his endeavor for freedom. And we ought to do well, I think, to consider what face of possibilities we, through our actions, construct and leave over to those who will follow us. In his work on reparations and the climate crisis, the philosopher Ulu Femi Taiwo talks about adopting the perspective of a future ancestor to make a very similar point, right? Which is to think of ourselves as creating the circumstances in which the next generation will fight their political fights, and how can we give them the best chance of persevering? And so I think we can take a longer view of things. We can ask, what now? What next? And what else? And hopefully the voyage to dystopia does not leave the reader thinking, well, everything's already lost. It's also hopeless. But to be, as I said earlier, in some ways an optimist about what is possible, even if what is probable does look very dark.
- [107:18]
B
Well, no, and I think you make a good point there, and it circles us all the way back to your opening with Ballard, and Ballard's contention that his point was to be transformative, not to bury us in pessimism and the end of the world. And with that, I want to extend a huge thank you to Professor Matthew Cole for sharing his invaluable time and insights with us today. His new book, Fear the Dystopia and Political imagination in the 20th century, is available now from the University of Michigan Press.
- [107:58]
A
Sam.