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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
So then the whole thing gets handed to Silicon Valley and the tax sector in 1995, totally privatized.
And it's only there that you start to get this mythology, this fairy tale that they sometimes encourage that like the Internet is almost running out of nowhere and value is being created out of the clouds.
But in fact, it's a part of a long history of kind of public private partnership that's often been the way that America has.
gets its advantage in the world, creating a space for competing firms, bailing out when structurally necessary, but not really picking winners in a direct way very often across the 20th century.
Yeah, I mean, it's a different kind of social contract for sure.
But I think one of the arguments we want to make in the book is to kind of push back a bit at the idea that Musk is just a crony capitalist or just someone who's like, you know, stealing from the public purse.
If you look at two of his biggest companies, where his two biggest companies, SpaceX and Tesla, they both step in to serve a specific state need at a certain specific moment.
So one thing that I didn't know until we started publishing or working on this book is that SpaceX comes right out of the global war on terror.
Right.
So Donald Rumsfeld, September 10th, 2001, stands in front of the brass at the Pentagon and says the Cold War is over, but there's a new enemy and the enemy is us.
It's like the old one.
It's top-down.
It's hidebound.
It's too centralized.
It's not flexible.
It can't think on its feet.
We need to now fight ourselves.
It's democracy.
It's democracy, but it's actually Silicon Valley.
Yeah, I mean, democracy is ultimately the problem.
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