James Pogue
speaker
179 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
James Pogue’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And so all of a sudden, things that Kaczynski were saying, you know, in his critique of industrial society, in his critique of something that goes a lot deeper than communications technologies, all of a sudden that started to make sense to people on a gut level who would have never shared this years ago. And I think broadly speaking,
We may still have an entire societal consensus on both left and right that once the technology is here, you can't really put the genie back in the bottle. But I think we also have a pretty broad-based societal consensus on left and right that these technologies are not benefiting us and that it would almost be better if...
Let's not say necessarily they'd never been invented, but if some, let's say, societal agency, some force within our society have been able to corral how they function and what they did to us during that period.
You know, I mean, this is kind of... If you want to talk about, like, how this whole thing could, in my opinion, end up going pretty bad... Well, I mean, there's a million, million different ways this could all end up going bad, and in certain ways it already is.
But part of it is that Trump himself, as the sort of kingly figure looking down over this squabbling coalition, he's a patronage politician at this point. And... You know, if you're a patronage politician, you look down at the sackums around you and you say, well, that guy's got a constituency and I've got to keep that guy happy.
And so, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but it was originally Trump saying, yo, TikTok, we got a problem here. And then he flipped because he discovered that there was a constituency for it that was going to hurt him if he lost them. And so I would wager, you know,
based on the conversations I've had with JD over the years, I would wager that if JD had had his way, there would still not be TikTok. I would say as well, just from my own perspective to editorialize a little bit, something opened up in our society when we saw TikTok go down for a minute. Because I think there's been a pretty long period in our history where we just thought...
We do not have the state capacity to shut something with 170 million users and however many billions of dollars in revenue that it has.
And through some combination of sort of Trumpian resurgence and a real belief that they can suddenly like wield the levers of state in ways to do their stuff that are far more powerful than they believed in 2016, something has opened up where everyone kind of realizes now that the state has to get back in the driver's seat.
So to keep with the old school leftism for a second, what's the phrase, you know, dismantling the master's house with the master's tools?
Wow, that's very funny, actually.
Well, so to go into like how this really worked, like there was something about Twitter pre-Musk that actually like made their culture very vibrant. And it essentially worked, not that anyone understood this at the time, I don't think, but it worked to serve their movement incredibly well.
Because basically to succeed on Twitter, as they will describe this, to be good at Twitter, people talk about this. Are you good enough at Twitter to build your world out of this? And these Anons who are coming up who are – I mean, I don't want to blow up anyone's spot because some of this I don't have completely fact-checked.
But I will tell you behind the scenes that 100%, some of these people who came up as Twitter anons are now going to be going into the administration. They're going to be taking jobs in the actual seat of power now. And they built that by having this worldview that was just... Interesting to a lot of people who weren't even necessarily right wing.
It felt cooler and it felt as I think anybody even, you know, coming from the left or coming from a fairly liberal persuasion could look at Twitter during some of those years, you know, sort of 2016 up through 2020 and and just feel like it was only really allowing people in the mainstream to have a very circumscribed worldview.
And in so much as Twitter operated as quote unquote, the ultimate editor of institutions like the New York Times, it gave them a huge amount of freedom to kind of experiment and yet not drive themselves into super extreme positions. Because if you went into super extreme positions, suddenly you're banned and you're not getting a lot of engagement. Post-Musk, that has changed.
And so what you've seen, in fact, and people on the right will criticize this a lot, actually, is you've seen a lot of jokers and morons who can really drive conversation by being really adversarial, by policing the bounds of the movement, by jumping on anything that deviates even a little bit from what they've decided is the sort of MAGA, agreed, this is how we do it, kind of worldview. And so...
For example, when the H-1B visa dust-up happened over Christmas just now, what you saw were really extreme voices of people who are pretty much openly saying America is a nation built by white Europeans and we should get it back to being a nation built for white Europeans. And that was what basically became the general view because that's now what succeeds, right?
Well, so I think what we've basically seen in the last few months is a consensus built that the way back to the past is by rocket shipping into the future. And some of that is actually coalition politics. Some of that is, I think, in my opinion, some people who are more tech skeptical just kind of saying, all right, let's try this.
And so you can go back to, for example, I was friends with David Graeber, you know, the great anarchist philosopher. And David did a debate with Peter Thiel on tech. And the critique was technology is not actually benefiting us. It's become this rent-seeking capitalist kind of evil. In fact, like, check on human progress. And...
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