Quinn Slobodian
speaker
708 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 10 Jun
Quinn Slobodian’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Sometimes it's even global.
It gets even bigger.
It's my pleasure.
Yeah, I mean, in a way, that's how capitalism always works, right?
It's a new way of organizing the world through technology that produces a changed social relationship or new relationship to the government and a new set of languages to describe that.
What's unique about the present moment, I think, being in this era of digital capitalism, where a small number of firms kind of carry the whole stock market, become the whole growth story for the economy, right?
For everyone's well-being and prosperity, it means you get a couple of people appointed as like disproportionately important for the ongoing success of that project.
And then their products become disproportionately important.
So every day from our interaction here on the screen to, you know, making a payment online to...
putting something into the cloud or listening to something streaming or doing something on a spreadsheet.
We're all, we're mediating with the services provided to us by Silicon Valley companies.
And that's not even just an American condition.
That's a global condition, right?
People all over the world are also subscribing to the softwares of Silicon Valley to just go about everyday life.
And that can be okay.
Actually, that can be a way that we describe in the book that
state capacity and social capacity can be expanded.
Like we can actually do things that we weren't able to do before because of these services.
But it also produces a kind of asymmetrical dependency on these small number of people who, in the example of the person we're gonna be talking most about today, Elon Musk, can seem like a real vulnerability and a risk because those people, if they have their hand on the switch,
can decide to turn off all of that state capacity at the moment that they decide that their whimsy.
Showing 1–20 of 708 · page 1 of 36
Next →