← UnHerd with Freddie Sayers
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- [00:00]
Ryan Reynolds
Hey, Ryan Reynolds here wishing you a very happy half off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half price, not half the service. Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price. So that means a half day. Yeah, give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront.
- [00:23]
Mint Mobile / iHerb Advertiser
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- [01:22]
Freddie
Hello and welcome back to Unherd. So from time to time we like to take a break from the day to day minutiae of the political battle and try to think about bigger themes, practical things coming down the road, philosophical themes that are maybe going to shape our future world and spend some time on them. So we're going to encourage you to come with us on such a journey today. The theme is the Smart City. You may not have even heard of this phrase, but it's the idea that cities of the future may become more and more technology and Internet and data enabled so that they end up resembling applications more than the cities of the past. To guide us through this topic and try and work out how it might become real for us. I am delighted to say we have back on the channel Matthew B. Crawford, friend of the show, someone who we've spoken to quite a few times over the years. A very special philosopher and writer. You might remember his book Shopcraft as Soulcraft or the case for Working with your Hands, which was the UK edition, a really important book, why We Drive, another classic and my personal favourite, the World Beyond. You'd head. In any case, he is diverting his considerable brain to the dangers and intrigue of the Smart City in an essay for us this week at Unherd and we've persuaded him to talk us through it. So welcome back to the show.
- [02:46]
Matthew B. Crawford
Matt thanks, Freddie. It's good to be back here.
- [02:49]
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- [03:35]
Freddie
First question has to be what is a smart city?
- [03:39]
Matthew B. Crawford
Well, I think it's the idea is that you can take the logic of interconnected electronic devices and apply it to the human landscape. So everything that takes place in the smart city will be optimized and orchestrated by a sort of urban operating system. So the energy and sewage infrastructure, the police protections, trash collection, the timing of deliveries, the orchestration of traffic lights and the allocation of street capacity for traffic, all this will be massaged by data science. And the hope is that it would achieve a kind of frictionlessness. And this speaks to, I think, what's a long standing ambition of sort of high modernist urban planning.
- [04:31]
Freddie
So just to make it real for people. So some of these things are already happening, right? It's not just a theoretical concept I've got in my notes here. There are examples all over the world of cities already becoming smart. There are plans in California to build a kind of super tech enabled city that hasn't yet happened but is apparently bankrolled by someone called Mark Law. There are lots of cities in America. Columbus, Ohio has a smart city transportation system. Chicago has something called the array of things, which is all lifetime surveillance and sensors, sensors across the city collecting data on everything from air quality, traffic and noise designed to kind of create some feedback loop to make the city more efficient. San Francisco, in fact, you and I have driven together in a self driving car around San Francisco. That was an eerie experience. And even here in Europe there are in Barcelona for example, something called the superiles super blocks which is all about using the Internet of things for managing waste collection, public lighting and soil moisture. So this stuff just to reassure people that we're not kind of completely out on a limb here imagining something that isn't happening is already real. Yeah.
- [05:45]
Matthew B. Crawford
And in the 2010s, Google planned to build a sort of model smart city within Toronto. It was sort of a demonstration of what is possible, a banzai version of it. That kind of reminds you of Potemkin's village, which was similarly constructed to try to sway elite opinion about what's possible. Eventually, the citizens of Toronto nixed this plan over concerns about data privacy or data ownership. And it's interesting in the sort of history of grand projects to remake the city, often they have been cited in locations in the developing world where there is no robust tradition of self rule that can sort of put up resistance to the plan. So, for example, Brasilia in Brazil and Chandigarh in India were chosen by Courbassier precisely because there wasn't going to be any resistance to the plan. So that speaks to a kind of blank slatism that I think is appealing to, you know, people in the grip of some vision, because it, you know, kind of requires clearing away all the sedimented local history that just gets in the way, according to this mindset.
- [07:06]
Freddie
So there's a sort of sense that if you can design the city correctly, you can design society alongside it.
- [07:14]
Matthew B. Crawford
Yeah, right. It's a very concrete manifestation of the whole ambition of social engineering, I would say.
- [07:22]
Freddie
So you mentioned Le Corbusier and the modernists there. That's obviously a different kind of thing. Brasilia is the capital of Brazil, located in the rainforest, totally planned, modernist, strange capital that some people still think is very beautiful and interesting, but has never really become the metropolis that maybe they had hoped.
- [07:42]
Matthew B. Crawford
Yeah, I mean, the history is a checkered one of such efforts. I mean, Paris is a beautiful city, and it was much of it demolished in the 19th century and rebuilt under Louis Napoleon according to a master plan. And often. What kind of. One of the ambitions in such a master plan is to render the city more legible, more sort of transparent to government, for one thing, boulevards radiating out from a center. Apparently the rationale for that was. Or the movement of troops for putting down rebellions, which was a perennial problem in Paris at that time. The smart city. You know, it's all about collecting data and rendering sort of everything that's happening in this city sort of maximally legible. And that has always been one of the prerequisites for empire. There's a political theorist, I guess you could call him, James C. Scott, who wrote a book you may have heard of seeing Like a state. The point is that you need to sort of have a synoptic view of everything that's going on in society. And once you have such a picture in hand, and you know that that begins in the 19th century, the sort of administrative apparatus that allows you to get sort of an intellectual grasp on what's happening in the city, once you have that in place, the city becomes very attractive as an object to engineer some kind of vision. So the worry, I guess, is that some of the sort of unruly felicities that make urban life delightful, the unplanned sort of irregularities, will somehow be ironed out because it just simply doesn't compute, you know. So if the, if spaces are designed to sort of over determine the uses that can be made of them, then it's like you're foreclosing some of the possibilities of use that might be open with a less determinate plan in place.
- [09:52]
Freddie
So just so our kind of audience is clear here, we're not saying, or you're not saying that any kind of planning or grand vision for a city is innately bad. I mean, as you said, Paris is, I would say, pretty successful example. They cleared away a lot of shanty towns and medieval streets and they built the grand boulevards. And lots of people around the world think it's one of the great cities. Is the idea then that that same instinct, whilst occasionally successful in the past, takes on a more sinister tone when it's accompanied by the powers of modern technology?
- [10:27]
Matthew B. Crawford
I think that's one element of it, yeah. So, I mean, Google, which was planning this city, clearly has a kind of governmental aspiration. And you know, we might be willing to trade some democratic control, you know, if they can make the trains run on time, so to speak, that means that's a trade off that many people would be willing to make. But we should be clear what the trade off is. And it's having some say in the institutions that we live within. So the issue comes down to sovereignty, I think, because, you know, this will not. This will be a sort of proprietary, opaque data science orchestrating these things. It will not really be accessible to inspection. It won't be open to sort of democratic pressures. As far as I can see.
- [11:18]
Freddie
It's obvious kind of corollary is the electric car or the autonomous vehicle in that sense, that if we move from a city or a shared space where each of us is deciding where we're going to go and at what speed and at our own pleasure, into a world where there is some kind of central Control some computer somewhere that we can't see that is somehow guiding us through frictionless pathways.
- [11:47]
Matthew B. Crawford
Well, that's certainly a possibility that's opened up by autonomous cars because they're, you know, Internet dependent, Internet enabled. So yeah, centralized control is certainly a possibility. And even short of the sort of grander smart city vision, the idea of remote control cars is to some extent already with us. So for example, both Mercedes and Volkswagen announced that their electric cars, the higher levels of performance, are available only by subscription, so they can reach in remotely and detune the motor to give it less performance. So the idea of ownership seems to be giving way to this subscription model, this dependent on terms of service that are unilaterally set and revocable at will. So yeah, all of this I think rubs us a bit the wrong way. The concept of ownership, like I just said, the concept of sovereignty. Both of these seem to be kind of eroding under this vision of remote control.
- [13:01]
Freddie
You know what it reminds me of hearing you talk is Paul Kingsnorth a little bit. He has just published a book called against the Machine. He came and did his book launch here at Unherd. He's very much also anxious by this great interconnected machine of technology and modernity that he feels somehow alienates us from a more vital existence. He seems to dislike cities full stop. I don't even think the Renaissance era city was something that he feels very fondly towards. You're not in that group, are you? You're someone who thinks cities can be wonderful.
- [13:36]
Matthew B. Crawford
Yeah, I, I, I'm a fan, a fan of civilization and cities, you know, including very modern sort of, you know, not just some vision of the Renaissance city that is attractive for romantic reasons, but you know, urban skateboarding. I find this, this awesome phenomena where just a bunch of people will kind of spontaneously find each other and take over some plaza and repurpose it for their activity. And so there's a tendency to want to clamp down on that, you know, call security is the motto. And we tend to assume that that is maybe due to liability concerns or something like that. And I'm sure, you know, that plays into it. But I think there's a, there's a taste for order that kind of slips the bonds of any such calculation sort of utility maximizing it becomes its own kind of fetish to sort of clamp down on the spirit of play. Because play always, you know, there's some play community that wants to make its own rules and sort of does, makes their own rules of some game amongst themselves. And that's the possibility of doing that means that there can't be some master plan that is over determining every possible use of that plaza.
- [14:59]
Freddie
So in other words, in the perfect smart city, there would be no room for such play. I mean, skateboarders don't feature in the Master Planner's plan.
- [15:10]
Matthew B. Crawford
Well, they're not predictable, right? And that's what human beings are. They're not predictable. And that's the glory of freedom, I guess. Already spaces that feel unadministered feel like they're disappearing. I don't know about you, but I love sometimes to just be in some place where there's, like, railroad tracks and just like, you know, homeless encampments or whatever. It is just spaces that are kind of outside the. The administered space because it. It just feels like, I don't know, you can feel like you can breathe a little bit. Not homeless encampments.
- [15:46]
Freddie
Homeless encampments are becoming quite a common feature of most American cities. What I find really intriguing about this kind of line of thinking is that it actually connects your earlier writing as well. I mean, I can recall passages where you've written about surfing and the joys of that, driving a traditionally engineered car, even just moving as a. Quite a kind of spiritually important thing to be able to do. So it's funny that your latest example is skateboarders, because it feels that's very coherent with the way you see a kind of vital and properly lived life. You got to be able to move at whim through it. Is that fair?
- [16:31]
Matthew B. Crawford
Yeah. And I. You know, when you first begin to learn to walk as a toddler, when the kid is finally able to, like, you know, run across the room, you can see a joy that comes over them. It's the feeling of your powers expanding. You're sort of moving into the world. And then, you know, you learn to ride a bicycle at some age, and now suddenly, your. Your world has gotten even bigger. Your. Your capacity for speed has gotten bigger. Nietzsche said that joy is the feeling of your power increasing. And I think as we learn to extend our mobility with these things that become like prosthetics really, the b. The skateboard, they almost become part of your body once you get, you know, really competent at using them. I think something like that happens driving a car, or can, especially if it's a car, that sort of preserves very direct, sort of seat of the pants connection to the road, as opposed to having so many layers of electronic mediation between you and the road.
- [17:34]
Freddie
So, in other words, there is a fundamental difference between moving around spontaneously using a machinery that is connected to you versus sitting in a highly engineered electric vehicle where it beeps and tells you to put your seat belt on. It will beep if you, you know, don't drive in exactly the, the right distance from either lane. It will beep if you approach the speed limit. It may even cancel your speed if you start going too fast. That is a very different experience. It doesn't have that feeling of being alive.
- [18:05]
Matthew B. Crawford
Yeah, there's, I mean, there's clearly safety rationales for all of those interventions which are important and you know, those, those are being spoken for by, you know, very prominent voices. But what I'm trying to speak for is this feeling of being administered and surveilled and sort of nannied at all times. I think there's a feeling of claustrophobia in much of modern life. And I have to think that, you know, this revival of vitalism and the sort of the young online. Right. Is partly a response to this claustrophobia. Yes, it's partly safetyism. It's. Yeah, there's just a kind of logic of control that seems to be voracious and it's kind of spread through every domain of life.
- [18:54]
Freddie
So here's a perplexing example for you. I have become very keen on electric scooters as a way of getting around London. In fact, my colleagues think it looks somewhat eerie and occasionally terrifying as I kind of sail silently around these streets. I find that very, very pleasing. It's quiet, you move at a nice pace, you have no telephones interrupting you, you can enjoy your surroundings. And I would actually choose that mode of transport over any other as a way of getting around London. Traffic is not a problem. And yet that is an electric vehicle powered by a central computer that is monitoring my position as I go around. And literally, if I go into a borough inside London where they have not accepted scooters, it will stop. So unpick that one for me. Am I self contradictory here?
- [19:46]
Matthew B. Crawford
I don't think so. I mean, short of, you know, being disabled because you've gone beyond its boundaries, it sounds like it's a very unobtrusive of design. It's entirely you who's moving and sure, it's monitoring your movements. And so if you think about it, maybe that becomes slightly creepy or something, but the sheer physical joy of your speed doesn't seem in any way compromised. And being electric, I have nothing against electric cars. In fact, I drove one for the first time recently and loved it as a means of propulsion. Electricity makes a Lot of sense to me. So this isn't a kind of nostalgic insistence on internal combustion.
- [20:31]
Freddie
So I'm allowed to be a Matt Crawford fan and still navigate London on my electric line bike or scooter.
- [20:37]
Matthew B. Crawford
Encouraged.
- [20:37]
Freddie
Okay, encouraged. So let's just talk about the politics of this a little bit because it is intensely political, how you design a city. And what you're pointing out here is that there is, it's a kind of progressive perhaps vision, or at least a rationalist vision, which these smart cities with their gods of efficiency and frictionlessness and perhaps control, it's quite a big government world. Do you think that's true? Are we taking it too far to read politics into urban design?
- [21:14]
Matthew B. Crawford
I don't think so. I think what throws many people off is the fact that it is corporations doing the grand vision rather than governments. So libertarians get confused by this because they think the only threats to liberty are the government. But the distinction between government and corporate power seems like it's become just a merely sort of semantic tick that persists through habit, given just how much the sort of character of everyday life is determined by these for profit firms that have a kind of governmental role in our life. Mark Zuckerberg actually said that in a lot of ways we're more like a government setting policy for people.
- [22:05]
Freddie
Do you think it's reminiscent of, of the COVID era? This was another time where we spoke together a lot. And it, in a way, it was that same sense that public space needed to be sanitized. That was the, that was the impulse behind a lot of those kind of quite extreme Covid measures, that somehow it was the government's job, or maybe private company's job. But it was, the goal was to have the space, the physical space we all inhabit, literally the air we breathe, in the case of COVID sanitized, risk free. Do you think there's a similar thing happening with the smart city movement?
- [22:46]
Matthew B. Crawford
Yeah, I think. Well, when you're trying to sell such a project to the public, safety is the go to sort of rhetorical device. Right? Because who wants to be pro death? And then similarly in Covid times, anyone making arguments about the sort of costs of locking everything down, the response was to sort of label them pro death. And that's a line of criticism that just tends to shut things down and obscure from us goods that are beyond sort of mere life, sort of bare life. So questions about the good life fade from view or are muscled off stage age. Once you invoke sort of bare survival and that there's a kind of nihilism to that once you've declared that in this emergency, you know, we can't indulge concerns about living well as matter of survival. And of course, in the case of COVID that was wildly overblown for the great bulk of the population, Right. Who was not at serious risk of death from it. So. But, you know, the fact that that was the. The move made by proponents of lockdowns just indicates how powerful that kind of alarmism can be in the public square.
- [24:10]
Freddie
The parallel is then that during the COVID era, keeping as many people alive as possible as the only metric that you judged for success meant that if you started saying, well, look, my elderly parents are alive, but they've been locked in their house for a year and their souls are decaying in this isolation, that really matters. That is a hugely important thing for them. And for me, that didn't count because it didn't show on the infections chart, which was our kind of society's measure of success. And I suppose the parallel would be if you could prove that a smart city where no one is allowed to drive their own vehicle and, you know, it's all controlled by some brilliant AI algorithm, if deaths by road traffic accident are halved, then to resist it purely by saying, hey, but it's not fun. My soul doesn't soar as I'm being carried around in my smart vehicle. I want to feel. I want. I'm Matthew Crawford. I want to feel the tarmac beneath the wheels and feel like my power is expanding. The authorities, I suppose, just wouldn't even know how to handle that argument. They would just dismiss it outright.
- [25:25]
Matthew B. Crawford
Well, you've. You've put it in a way maximally that would invite, you know, dismissal of my type of argument as irresponsible. Do you remember the movie Wall E where there's scenes where these grotesquely fat creatures are hovering around in their driverless pods and watching their entertainments on the screen and slurping from giant cups, their Slurpees or whatever, it's a picture of beings that are completely safe and somehow less than human. So I think it's not that we have to make a case for the pleasures of the tarmac against, you know, the. The more adult, responsible concern for safety, but rather we should ask, well, wait a minute, how you're trying to fundamentally alter the human landscape in such a way as to attenuate our own embodied sort of the way we've inhabited the world from time immemorial. It seems to me the burden of argument should be on those who want to carry out such a transformation. I don't think you can make that case without revealing a certain nihilistic streak, a certain anti humanism. I would say.
- [26:52]
Mint Mobile / iHerb Advertiser
Let'S be real. When it comes to your health, authenticity matters. For nearly 30 years Iherb has quietly built one of the world's leading online wellness destinations trusted by millions of customers in 180 countries. At iHerb, every product comes from verified top rated brands stored, handled and shipped directly from our own climate controlled, state of the art facilities. No third party sellers, no shortcuts, just the highest standards of quality and transparency from cart to doorstep. That's why more and more people are turning to Iherb, where wellness and integrity meet. Visit iherb.com trusted wellness delivered worldwide hey.
- [27:37]
Ryan Reynolds
Ryan Reynolds here wishing you a very happy half off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half price, not half the service. Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price. So that means half day. Yeah, give it a try@mintmobile.com switch upfront.
- [28:00]
Mint Mobile / iHerb Advertiser
Payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only speed slow auger 35 gigabytes of network's busy taxes and fees extra see mintmobile.com.
- [28:07]
Sherrell Dorsey
Hi, this is Sherrell Dorsey from Ted Tech and this episode is brought to you by Solidigm. The World Runs on data and data relies on storage, but most businesses rarely think about how crucial that storage really is. The truth is it's no longer just a commodity with new demands and constraints, especially from AI. The old ways of managing data are holding innovation back. Solid State Storage from solidigm is changing that. It helps reduce energy use, shrink physical footprints, and accelerate data at the edge, unlocking more from your AI infrastructure. Learn more at whatsthestateofyourstorage.com hi, it's Paige.
- [28:43]
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- [29:31]
Freddie
So what is the proper way to respond to this then do you think? Because I mean it's hard to argue with the fact that this stuff is coming each year, each five years. We are taking steps forward. As I mentioned, driverless cars are already here, smart cities are already here. Where do you think it goes? Should there be a sort of resistance movement? Do you think people should be designing off grid cities for the kind of recusants of the new rationalism to flock to and live in kind of chaotic, spontaneous ways together? I'm not sure how property prices would do in those cities or I mean, how do we respond?
- [30:12]
Matthew B. Crawford
Again, I object to calling them chaotic. I mean it would just be like, you know, was the, was this the city of the year 2000 a chaotic place? I mean, why would should the standard be this rather bizarre futuristic vision of, you know, total orchestration by an urban operating system? That's the weird thing here. It is political. I mean in London I gather you have these vigilante destroyers of speed cameras, right? The ultra low emission zone.
- [30:48]
Freddie
I mean I will say that is a very special kind of tyranny because 20 miles an hour on a larger road is really improperly slow. It is not only controlled from above. And yes, there will be speed cameras every hundred meters or so, so you're always busted and fined if you, if you break it. But it's also self evidently pointless because in some cases there's a road I drive on each week, it's four lanes big, it's a big road, it's an exit road from London and everyone is crawling along at 20 miles an hour. I think that that does become very political because then you've got very angry drivers.
- [31:26]
Matthew B. Crawford
Well, the manifest irrationality of the rule that's been applied there speaks to how insulated the people making these decisions are from the people that they're pissing off through their decisions, right? So it speaks to a kind of democratic deficit that's already there in urban governance or I don't know what the authority is that's doing this. In London. That same logic gets intensified when the governing entity is something like say Google, for which there is zero mechanism of accountability to popular pressures. I mean a free marketeer will say, well there's the market is the correcting mechanism rather than voting. But that that becomes absurd. Right, because these are quasi monopolies. So that whole logic of the free market I think is out the window.
- [32:19]
Freddie
If you're born into Google's new smart city, it's not like you can choose to reject it.
- [32:25]
Matthew B. Crawford
Yeah, so what? People can opt out. Well, have you ever tried just opting out of your cell phone plan? It's going to take you half a day at least just to get that done. Or your bank, what you're going to call up all 10 of those entities you have automated payments going to because there's some mysterious recurring charge that's only like whatever, $5 a month. It's just not worth the hassles. Like in other words, I think the nuisance factor is a kind of hidden cost that creates barriers to opting out and to sort of switching that don't show up in the kind of more orthodox versions of the free market mentality.
- [33:11]
Freddie
Let me just push you on the political aspect because what's so interesting is even in the past five years, let's say since we've been having conversations, there was what appeared to be a political movement against this stuff. There was real anger about a cashless society, for example, that became for a while an important political talking point. Some of the anti lockdown protests, you think of the truckers in Canada where you are, you know, that was, was very much a rebellion against that kind of technocratic centralized control. And yet the right wing populists of today have as their figureheads Elon Musk who is literally, you know, the, the grand architect of the electric car movement. And people like Crypto Technology Bros are the new political heroes of the political right. So it feels like there are these two strains that are quite hard to reconcile.
- [34:13]
Matthew B. Crawford
It's a very interesting realignment because the tech firms were unambiguously sort of allied with the Democratic party and now they're allied with the Republican party. And you know, quite apart from smart cities and driverless cars or things like that, the AI revolution where it seems like big tech has just been given a blank check to, you know, run ahead with this in terms of regulatory oversight, I suspect that could really come back to haunt the, the mega people because I think the intuitions of the, what used to be called the middle American radical, that sort of prairie populist, you know, hater of both government and corporate power. As this AI stuff gets widely taken up and sort of displacing human agency and human judgment in so many quarters, I think these right wing populists are going to forfeit that kind of visceral support that they, that they started off with.
- [35:24]
Freddie
Do you think it's going to be far to say that the energy of right wing populism, which was sort of authentic when it first erupted round about 2016, is when it really kind of broke through, has actually been co opted by the forces of big tech centralized oligarchy, or however you want to describe it, and it's been cleverly repurposed. So now the Elon Musk's of the world or the big tech overlords are now lining up and supporting Donald Trump because they can see that actually they can make this energy work for them.
- [36:02]
Matthew B. Crawford
Well, yeah, I mean, obviously Elon played a big role in the election, in the, in getting Trump elected with the Twitter takeover and all that. And yeah, there was that moment, I don't know if you remember, just about a year ago around Christmas time, when there was the big dust up over H1B visas where Elon came out militantly in favor of, you know, maximum H1. So this is the visa program for skilled tech workers, primarily from India. And so that, that there was a sign of a real rupture with the mega base. Yeah, I mean obviously these guys are just opportunists without, without principle when it comes to sort of a political philosophy. I think that's fair to say.
- [36:47]
Freddie
If you feel like crypto. I'm kind of dancing around a few topics here, but it feels very connected. Do you feel like crypto is another strong example of that? Because the CR Crypto revolution was supposed to be about liberation from government control. Right. The whole manifesto of crypto is that actually, you know, it's just a decentralized blockchain. No longer will governments be controlling your money. This is a way for the little guy to throw off the yoke of governmental control, which is why it had populist support. And yet, however many 10 years later, now it looks like the people getting rich from crypto are the kind of already established power players. And it's completely enmeshed with many populist projects, including Trump. And now here in the uk, Nigel Farage, he loves crypto. You know, his, his version of reinventing the soul of England is to import data centers and have massive data centers around the country so that we can compete in the AI revolution. Where do you stand on that?
- [37:56]
Ryan Reynolds
Hey, Ryan Reynolds here wishing you a very happy half off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50 off, unlimited. To be clear, that's half price, not half the service. Mint is still Premium unlimited wireless for a great price. So that means some premium half day. Yeah, give it a try@mintmobile.com switch upfront.
- [38:19]
Mint Mobile / iHerb Advertiser
Payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to 15 per month required new customer offer for first 3 months only speed flow after 35 gigabytes of networks busy taxes and fees extra see mint.
- [38:26]
Sherrell Dorsey
Mobile.Com hi, this is Sherrell Dorsey from TedTech and this episode is brought to you by Solidigm. The World Runs on data and data relies on storage. But most businesses rarely think about how crucial that storage really is. The truth is it's no longer just a commodity with new demands and constraints, especially from AI. The old ways of managing data are holding innovation back. Solid state storage from solidigm is changing that. It helps reduce energy use, shrink physical footprints and accelerate data at the edge, unlocking more from your AI infrastructure. Learn more at whatsthestateofyourstorage.com.
- [39:04]
Matthew B. Crawford
As described by you, these developments it it would seem to confirm the iron law of oligarchy. I don't know who coined that term. If you're always going to have oligarchy, which is a kind of sobering thought, but okay, that seems plausible historically. Then it becomes a question of what is the character of the particular elite that is ruling. You know, it might be ecclesiastical authorities in the middle ages or it might be tech bros in the 2000 and twenties. One question, I think the question is do they have a sense of the common good that they feel beholden to, responsible to? And I think that's what is lacking on both left and right. So on the left the problem was more that sort of we are the clericy of the virtuous and we're going to do what's right and not concern ourselves too much with whether we have popular support. Whereas on the right, yeah, maybe there's a kind of IQ fetish where it's a clearesty not of the virtuous but of the smart. The ancient definition of tyranny, like in Aristotle, is a rule for private gain as opposed to rule for the common good. So you can have a tyrannical oligarchy. You could have a tyrannical monarchy. You call that tyranny? That's something that's, I think hard to encode in any sort of formal governmental structure. It's a question of how the elites are formed, what kind of education they receive, and whether they feel themselves under something higher than them. And I think that's where the idea of, of God becomes politically very salient. You know, if the monarch feels himself to be between the people and his God and he's a sort of conduit for that. That is a very serious sort of check on absolute power, that he's sort of himself a servant of something higher. And I don't know how you. Again, I don't think there's any way to sort of codify that in a system so much as that there's a metaphysical foundation that has to be there in order to have non tyrannical government potentially.
- [41:38]
Freddie
What links those two different types of tyranny? The kind of left version of you call it the clerisy of the virtuous and the right version, which is some kind of majoritarian rule or something at the moment they both have a rationalism to them. There's a kind of doing away with the small little infrastructures that guarantee liberty in order to bring forward a new program of government. What is the alternative to that, do you think? What should we be looking forward to try and keep that in check?
- [42:09]
Matthew B. Crawford
This dynamic that there's two ways of thinking about governing remind me of, you know, way back at the origins of liberalism. Thomas Hobbes was very impatient with sort of custom and the common law. These sort of accretions of irrational practices that had just kind of accumulated over time and represented the dead weight of tradition. And he thought law should be, you know, rational. Let's think it out from scratch, beginning from first principles. As an alternative to that. I very much like Jane Jacobs, who's not often invoked as a political theorist. She wrote this book, the Death and Life of Great American Cities. So she was finding the reason, the reasons that are latent in our unthought practices and from them trying to reverse engineer the logic of a city. Whereas the sort of smart city inheritors of Hobbes spirit place their trust in their own powers of sort of a priori reason. The problem is that governing by syllogism doesn't work very well in part because the sovereign then forfeits that easy habitual law abidingness that custom secures. We follow customary laws or just, you know, social habits not out of fear, but because they are here with us. They're, they're our own, they're part of us.
- [43:44]
Freddie
Sounds like English common law. Certainly it sounds like. The difference is it's a kind of bottom up habitual way of living together. And the parallel in the city is the organically evolving city rather than the master planned city.
- [43:59]
Matthew B. Crawford
Yeah, and I think governing by a master plan requires heavy police work because again, you're forfeiting that sort of habitual deference to just these ways that are our ways and we feel a kind of ownership over them.
- [44:16]
Freddie
You're speaking to us from Winnipeg in Canada.
- [44:20]
Matthew B. Crawford
Mm.
- [44:21]
Freddie
What kind of place is that? How does that fit in the tyrannical smart city to wholesome organic city?
- [44:30]
Matthew B. Crawford
Well, Winnipeg doesn't seem in danger of being at the cutting edge of anything, so in that respect I find it fairly hospitable.
- [44:40]
Freddie
So that's one thing we could do in response to smart cities and the kind of rational master plans behind them. If we don't like them, there are still places we can get out of them too.
- [44:51]
Matthew B. Crawford
If you're willing to endure minus 40 degree winters. Yeah, I suppose so.
- [44:57]
Freddie
Matt, thank you so much for your time today.
- [44:59]
Matthew B. Crawford
Yeah, it was a pleasure.
- [45:01]
Freddie
That was friend of the show Matthew B. Crawford, the writer and philosopher. Who would have thought that urban design, the existential joy of movement and party politics could all be part of the same conversation? Only with Matt. Thanks to him and thanks to you for tuning in, this was unheard.
- [45:28]
Paige Desorbo
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- [46:14]
Sherrell Dorsey
Hi, this is Sherrell Dorsey from TedTech and this episode is brought to you by Solidigm. The world runs on data, and data relies on storage. But most businesses rarely think about how crucial that storage really is. The truth is, it's no longer just a commodity with new demands and constraints, especially from AI. The old ways of managing data are holding innovation back. Solid state storage from solidigm is changing that. It helps reduce energy use, shrink physical footprints, and accelerate data at the edge, unlocking more from your AI infrastructure. Learn more at whatsthestateofyourstorage.com hi, it's Paige.
- [46:50]
Paige Desorbo
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