A (0:00)

Hello. It's Thursday, which is normally a new episode day, but we're taking our first ever one week, one episode break from the show because we. I need a little breather after our one year birthday celebration. So I hope you will permit me this but because I would never ever leave you out in the cold, sort of bereft of stuff to enjoy, I want to introduce you to multitude's coolest and newest show from my friend Adam Becker, who is an astrophysicist and a tech journalist writer, writing and thinking and talking about the future and all of the good and bad stuff that is coming our way. He's like the opposite of me, like in every possible way, basically. His new show, Dreaming against the Machine comes out next week and we have a very special mini pre episode thing for you that I have secured so that you're not bored for all of Thursday because TGS is not here. It's not a trailer. It's like a real proper introduction to the show and I think you'll really enjoy it because Adam is excellent. Okay, have fun. See you back here next week for our regularly scheduled programming. Love you. Bye.

B (1:09)

I'm Adam Becker and this is Dreaming against the Machine. This is a podcast where I'm going to host conversations about science, society and what a good future could look like. And why I'm doing that has to do with a book that I wrote about some of the worst people in the world. That book is called More Everything Forever and it's about tech billionaires, the terrible ideas that they have for the future that they're trying to shove down our throats and why those ideas don't work and the strange places that those visions of the future come from. And I wrote that book basically because I have lived in the San Francisco Bay area for too long and gone to too many parties where I heard too many people just sound off on absolutely crazy ideas about the future that at first seemed, you know, crazy but harmless, but started creeping into our politics and our culture in ways that really freaked me out. Especially because I knew that these ideas couldn't work. Because before I became an author and a journalist, I was a physicist. I did a PhD in physics and learned a lot about know the fundamental laws of the universe. And while physicists have a tendency to believe that they know everything, and I like to think that I know that I don't know everything. But it is true that physics will, you know, tell you about some fundamental limits on what's possible in the world. And usually those limits are not the reasons why you can't do things. And if you run up against those limits, you've got a serious problem. And many, many of these ideas about the glorious future of humanity in space with a godlike AI, they end up running against limits in science. And many of those limits are in physics. And that's the book that I wrote. But in writing that book, I realized a few things. The first thing was that talking about these people and spending all of my time thinking about these people was really, really draining for me. It was a difficult and at times exhausting, scary, infuriating, just really emotionally difficult experience. And I got through that, you know, by talking with friends and spending a lot of time outside looking at trees. A lot of time looking at trees. Actually, I ended up, while I was writing the book, going and looking at the tallest trees, the biggest trees and the oldest trees in the world, all of which are here in California. But I realized that I needed to spend less time thinking about these people. You know, in my heart, the title of the book wasn't More Everything Forever, it was these Fucking People. And I can't spend all of my time thinking about these fucking people. But the other thing that happened, and this was unexpected, one of the wonderful and strange things that happens when you write a book is, you know, at least when I do it, I sit down and I have an outline that I write because I have this vision of how the book is gonna be in my head. And then, you know, sometimes I break up that outline into sub outlines, you know, one for each chapter, each section of each chapter. And then I go through and, you know, dig it and write it. But the writing, of course, never completely sticks to the plan. It's like having a map of a hiking trail, except the map is 50 years old and was created before they even first blazed the trail in the first place. And when you get there, you find, oh, the actual route of the trail is different from the map. And I lose it in some spots. And also there's been maybe a giant snowstorm or two that has knocked over a large number of trees and caused a stream to flood. And there's a lot of places where I just have to go and do something pretty different from what I thought I had to do. And there's no place where this is more important in a book than at the very beginning and the very end. And I thought that my book was going to have to end with me giving a positive vision of what I wanted the future to look like, because I spent the whole book talking about these really unbelievable dystopian and utopian visions of the future, all of which are horribly broken. And even the utopias are really just utopias for a few and dystopias for the rest of us. And that's a lot of what I wanted to get across to the readers in the book, is that, like, even if these ideas did work, which they don't, they aren't good ideas. They are bad. Scientifically, politically, sociologically, philosophically, you name it. But as they say, criticism is easy, building something is harder, Right? And I think that, in a way, writing a book is a form of building something. Even if that book is filled with criticism, I think we need criticism. It's important. It's part of the job of journalism. And I am certainly a journalist. But when it came time for me to write the end of the book, I had this big old blank space that said, talk about what a good future would look like. And I tried to do that, and it didn't work. And I tried again, and it didn't work. And it wasn't until I came across a quote from one of my favorite authors, George Orwell, that I realized what was going wrong. And I went and talked with my editor about it, and he said, yeah, just put that in the book. And what Orwell said was that most people who imagine utopia are like. The people are like someone who has a toothache, who thinks that happiness consists in not having a toothache. They've confused something that was good because it was temporary with something that should be a permanent state of affairs. That's not a direct quote, but it's close. It's pretty much what Orwell said. And then he goes on to say that we can't really come up with a utopia. The best we can do is say, well, the future should proceed along certain lines. We have certain goals in mind, but we can't picture what an entire good future looks like in every detail. It's not possible. And I think he's right. And I use that to change the ending of my book, to talk about one specific problem and specific solution to that problem, rather than coming up with a whole fantastical vision of a fully realized utopia. But at the end of the day, when I was done with the book, it was off to the editor. A few days after the final Edits was the 2024 election, and Trump won. And I was devastated because he's a monster and a fascist, and he's making the world a worse place for everyone on it, including himself, I think. But maybe that's a separate conversation. But I started thinking about hope and started thinking about, where can I find hope? And when the book came out the following April, and I went around and started giving talks about it, I just kept meeting people who were filled with despair. You know, Doge was in full swing. Something that I had actually written about in the book before it happened, because they had these people, these fucking people had said that that was what they wanted to do, and then they went off and did it, and it was even more horrible than we all thought it was going to be. And people kept asking me, you know, they've won. What can we do? Where is the hope? And I'd like to think that now, more than a year after that, or about a year after that, there's more obvious grounds for hope. We have seen a rising tide of backlash against the tech oligarchs, against the flood of AI slop that has taken over the Internet. And we've also seen some political developments here in the US that, you know, against the horrifying background of the destruction and incompetence of this administration, there's still some reason for hope. And the elections that we've had have gone pretty well. But I think that part of the reason I wasn't able to come up with a Utopia is not just what Orwell said. It's also what a friend of mine, Shazida, who's going to be on this podcast at some point, she said to me, coming up with good ideas about the future is something that we have to do in community. And I realized that she was right. Because what makes a future good, what makes a future good is it's a place where all of us can live, so all of us have to build it together. And so it can't just be me sitting in a room impurely alone, writing a book. Because there is nothing in this world that is more isolating as a profession, I think, than writing a book. Except maybe, like, lighthouse keeper or something like that. But it can't just be me up here alone coming up with what a future looks like. It has to be a conversation. It has to be a series of conversations with all sorts of people doing all sorts of things and thinking about things. Because one of the other things that I wrote about in the book, and that I really sort of came away with deeply after writing it, was that these fucking people believe that they know everything, that they are the smartest people who've ever lived. And I'm no longer sure I even understand the meaning of the word intelligence. I think that maybe, you know, that's a word that definitely has a long history of racism and eugenics behind it. And I also think that maybe we use it in ways that don't make much sense. But what I know for sure is that I don't know everything and that there are a lot of really important things that I have no expertise in. But one of the things I do think I'm pretty good at is having conversations with people and making the people I'm talking with feel comfortable and finding interesting people and asking them interesting questions about what they think the world could look like. And with my training as a scientist that I carry with me everywhere, whether I want to or not, that brings me a different perspective. And my hope for this show is that with these conversations, with all of these different people, we, you, the listener, me and my guests, and the wonderful team I have working with me on this podcast, that we can all start dreaming of a better future. One that doesn't involve this gigantic, inhuman force that I have perhaps grandiosely dubbed the Machine. I don't want to rage against the machine. When I was brainstorming titles for this podcast, I wrote down Rage against the Machine. And then I put in parentheses after that name already in use. But I don't want to rage against the machine because I don't want to be angry. I want to be hopeful. I want to think of a better future. I think a better future is possible. And you know, if you have read my work, if you've heard me talk on other podcasts, you probably know that I am a huge, completely sincere, cringingly sincere fan of Ursula K. Le Guin. And in one of her most famous pieces of work, the speech that she gave toward the end of her life, she said that we are going to need dreamers of a larger reality. And that is what I want to help make happen with this podcast. And I want you to do that with me here on Dreaming against the Machine. And I look forward to seeing what we can dream of together.