AI as Anti-Politics: Daniel Stanley on Technopopulism, Data, and Rebuilding Collective Power

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Is AI really the threat to democracy we've been told it is, or is it just democracy's own rot wearing a new face? Daniel Stanley of the Future Narratives Lab joins us to unpack his essay "AI as Anti-Politics," arguing the technology isn't an external assault on democratic life but the product of decades of shifts that already hollowed out collective political power. We explore technopopulism and ask what it would take to rebuild institutions capable of pushing back against extraction. Also in the discussion: data as a collective resource, the revival of interest in social clubs and in-person organizing, and why funding these new institutions might be the most difficult problem of all.

Future Narratives Lab: https://www.futurenarrativeslab.org/

Dan's paper: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jkxy_QPKk_W_yg4uanXx17Qnyka6ry-x/view?usp=sharing

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Glad to see you've made your way back to left hand. This is Craig from the podcast. Before Emma kicks off her interview with Dan Stanley today, with me and Toe, make sure to find your way to the show notes where you can find a link to Emma's class, which begins this Tuesday, August 4th. That's going to be a day or two after this episode drops. If you're listening when it does drop, this is probably your final chance to enroll. In addition to Emma's class, we have six new classes for fall 2026 already available on our website. There are some strong offerings this season, including one from podcast regular Bob Langan, where he presents a critical view of Carl Jung and his hidden relationship with Spinoza. This is a great chance to get a broad overview of both figures. Check out the new classes, and in the meantime, let's turn to our interview with Dan Stanley. We asked Dan about the roots of AI's anti-democratic tendencies, why technopopulism traps us on both the left and the right, and what it might actually take to rebuild collective power in the age of AI. Okay, let's listen.

SPEAKER_01 1:22

Hello and welcome to Left Hand. This is Emma Stamm. Today, we have Daniel Stanley as our featured guest. Daniel Stanley is executive director of Future Narratives Lab, a nonprofit research and development institute based in the UK that focuses on building the collective political power of civil society. He previously worked in grassroots community organizing and digital mobilization, and he studied social psychology. All of this contributed to his specific interest in the means and methods by which collective political bodies attempt to appeal to and shape cultural identities. His recent essay, AI as anti-politics, argues that rather than the threat to democracy, it's often framed as, this new technology is better understood as the direct product of a deeper logic and flaw within our democratic politics, with roots going back decades. It's this underlying weakness, he argues, that continually undermines efforts to build lasting countervailing power against profit-driven extraction, whether through technology or more generally. Daniel, thank you so much for joining us today.

SPEAKER_02 2:50

Thank you. No, it's great to be here and really looking forward to the discussion.

SPEAKER_01 2:53

So for my first question, I was wondering if you could just expand on the article a bit. I was wondering if you could maybe say a bit more about what you're particularly driving towards and also how it came to be.

SPEAKER_02 3:08

Yeah, great. Yeah. I mean, it's being honest, I think it's a little bit of a kind of, as many of these things are, of a sort of stitching together of different kinds of threads I've been following and things I've been interested in, and a kind of arriving at a moment where suddenly different things kind of connected together, and that was a kind of light bulb moment, I suppose. And so there's various places I could start here, and it was the kind of middle adjoining point of those places that that was actually the kind of genesis of this. But yeah, I mean, I suppose my interest in kind of technology and AI and data has been fairly like longstanding, particularly from a perspective of like how is those topics kind of portrayed in culture, and how is that portrayal of them in culture played a role in kind of reinforcing the way that they actually work in in practice and particularly like how we've allowed them to work. So that's something I've kind of been thinking about and writing about a little bit in the past. And I think that one of the things that I then maybe observed particularly coming out of that was that even when people were talking about the sort of threats of AI, there were certain types of threats and certain types of problems that were being kind of highlighted over others. And this in itself was something I found kind of interesting and wanted to explain. And so, in particular, looking at kind of the relation of AI to democracy and to politics, it was notable that it that it was always the thing that was talked about the most was like deep fakes, misinformation, a kind of heightening of and an intensifying of the kind of problems that had been seen in relation to technology and politics over the last couple of decades. And that seemed kind of a fairly unimaginative uh idea. We had this sort of technology that was being presented as a kind of transformational in every respect, at least by some of its advocates, and yet the the threat that it was being apparently was going to be opposed to politics would merely make misinformation a little bit worse. And undoubtedly it's true that it will, and it is, but I wanted to kind of understand that a little bit better. And I think one of the major pieces that I came across that really made that connection or helped make that connection for me is central to this piece, is a paper written by Henry Farrell and Harry Hand called AI and Democratic Publics, which I can talk about a little bit more and go into. But I think that makes a really important connection between those threats that are posed, supposedly posed to politics by AI, and then the benefits that are proposed that AI can also give to democracy. And it kind of pointed out that both of these things have in common a very specific idea of politics and democracy. And then diving into that a bit more, that connected up with some other thoughts and things I've been thinking about and writing about to do with the sort of the nature of democracy, the nature of politics today. And there seemed to be a real similarity there between the trend that we were seeing in democracy or trend we were seeing in politics and what AI represents itself and where it comes from. And so it was joining together these different threads and seeing that actually, maybe what we're talking about here is something that is one cohesive story, really, of something we've ended up, rather than seeing AI as this sort of external thing threatening democracy as this sort of vulnerable victim. Actually, the nature of our democratic politics as how it's emerged over the last few decades is precisely what has resulted in this specific form of AI that we have that has characteristics that are very closely linked to that trend. And so this is this is kind of where I arrive again, it's concluding that there's a kind of that closeness, which is not something that I'd seen sort of spelled out. So it felt like something was worth saying.

SPEAKER_01 6:49

Absolutely. And it's relevant to mention that the way that you and I got connected was through this shared interest. I think we we found each other because we were both thinking quite similar thoughts about what's happening with AI today. So when I first read this article, I was really gratified by how clearly you articulate what you were just saying about how AI is not a force being launched from without, from from beyond our democratic politics, but something that very much is a crystallization of issues that can be talked about completely without reference to AI. And to that point, I actually have a quote pulled up here from the part of the paper where you introduced this article by Hahn and Farrell. And maybe I'll read it and I have a few thoughts about it that maybe you could respond to. So this is on page two. You write in their paper, AI and Democratic Publics, Henry Pharrell and Hari Hahn document how the majority of efforts to improve democracy with AI are based on a very specific and limited idea of what democratic politics is and should be. Almost ubiquitously, such proposals center on the creation and support of mini-publics, and that phrase mini-publics is in scare quotes. Mini publics are temporary, randomly selected representative samples of the broader population. These are then supported to deliberate and come to conclusions on topics of concern, and those conclusions are taken as legitimately representative of the population as a whole. AI is proposed as a way of both improving the processes of such mini-publics, but also operating them at scale, enabling an efficient expansion of democratic political participation. Clearly, there are ways that AI might be used to smooth different parts of the political process. However, treating such mini-publics as the main way to do this presumes a very particular idea of democratic politics, which discards the collective formation and contestation of interests that has traditionally been at democracy's very core. Inherent to these temporary formations, favored by those who seek to improve democracy through AI, is the idea that politics is fundamentally a practice of individuals, rationally from their isolated opinions, and making reasonable arguments to each other. In this view, collectives are nothing more than a collection of unrelated individuals, only necessary as a matter of practical aggregation. This view includes no notion of differing power structures or competing interests, or how such interests and opinions are inevitably formed through and in the lasting groups of which individuals are part. As Han and Farell put it, on a fundamental level, such approaches assume away the agonism of politics, the basic fact that it involves different organized factions competing for power, appealing to an implausible notion that we can scrub power relations from democracy. In other words, that we can have democracy without politics. So before I say all the things that this made me think about, before I potentially get on to a very particular tangent, maybe you could say a little bit about what this means to you and why this article struck you so much.

SPEAKER_02 10:38

Yeah, no, I mean I love this paper. And I think that I'm always encouraging people to read it because I think a little bit like I hope my paper is just like it's sort of about AI in theory, but I think it opens up a much more kind of broad, interesting set of questions, really, a more fundamental. And it kind of makes you realize that like the question of AI is really just a sort of subset of that broader question. I think the that specific point about these two views of politics, I think is absolutely central and something that I think once you kind of it's kind of obvious, and I think that in many ways people, many people will have arrived at a kind of trivial, or at least I don't think it's going to be like a blinding insight to most people to be like, okay, there is like a uh view of politics or view of democracy that's more or less political, and there's a sort of depoliticizing idea of democracy that has been taken hold. And you see this in in many, many people as they say, in in SAU kind of who've explained this, this idea of post-politics, some people talk about sometimes other people that have talked about, like anti-politics, as I kind of refer to it further on. But I think that what it really captured for me is this idea that you and that I'm now seeing everywhere, that like it's remarkable how that kind of the fact that there is even different views of what politics is and should be so rarely comes up within these discussions about like democracy. Like, and this is something more the more now, the more I see it, the more evident it becomes is that almost all of the people, even who are arguing for kind of pro-democracy or defending democracy, or his whole focus is on what we should do to improve our democracy, it take for granted this particular idea that what that means is giving people the information they need to make rational choices in electoral votes. And that's it. And there is no place within that whatsoever for any sense in which there are like collective bodies that bring people together and that look to then form and define their collective interests and then impose those interests and push for them and contest with other collective bodies, and that this is the very much what politics is and should be and has been at different points in history, but is increasingly absent now. We've just kind of completely now we now we don't seem to even acknowledge that that ever existed. I mean, obviously, there are there are many people who have who understand this and we've done into it and written about it, but in terms of the public discourse about democracy and politics, and for instance, the the the impact of AI on democracy, whether that's from a positive or a negative stance, both of them very heavily lean towards this idea of a kind of, yeah, that politics is a sort of science, essentially, where what we're trying to do is measure what individuals on aggregate think, and then try you know translate that into a set of solutions that can then be applied to achieve a kind of the overall optimal outcome. And that that is in itself a kind of technical job, and this disconnected with a bunch of other things, which I can talk about. So again, this piece was so great as a sort of like joining between different areas that I've been thinking about, but just sort of crystallized that particular distinction of two ideas of what politics is and should be. And I can write a little bit further on about how we've maybe arrived there. But what I kind of find funny about this piece as well is I don't know if you ever come across these papers where you feel like even the people who've written it don't really understand how important it is. Not probably because both Henry Farrell and Hari Han are like incredible individuals who've written, who just seem to put out new brilliant things every like month and they're doing amazing work. I highly encourage people to who haven't done that to follow them both and look at their work. But I spoke to Hari Han about this in the course of writing of his piece, and I think that like because it's kind of a she's thinking deeply about democracy a lot of the time, all the time she's in the depths of like community organizing, thinking about how people come together. I think this is an obvious point to her, but I think it's one still the gap between how obvious it is to someone who's kind of on the ground working on these issues and seeing the importance of sort of aggregates and collectives to politics and the discourse at the level of how we think about it as a society is maybe not so apparent. Or I don't know. It's I do think there's a strange kind of almost like Emperor's New Clothes type thing where we're not like no one is talking about it, so no one's talking about it, at least within with outside of maybe academics. And obviously, yeah, I wouldn't pretend it's it's completely absent from conversation this, or it hasn't been something that's been pointed out in the past. But I think yeah, that kind of central point for me was a really critical one.

SPEAKER_01 15:20

My comments on this quote are way off in theory and almost like media theory and epistemology land. And maybe I'll come back around to that. But when you were sharing what you just shared, Dan, I actually had a few other thoughts that I think might flow a bit more directly from everything right now. So I know that Henry Pharrell is an academic. I think Hare Han is as well, right?

SPEAKER_02 15:47

She's an organizer, an academic, yeah, I think, but now an academic, she just said it.

SPEAKER_01 15:53

Yeah, understood. And and I'm I'm quite familiar with Henry Pharrell's work. I saw him speak actually earlier this year, and as you were sort of saying, he he writes about so many things that you do sometimes get the feeling that he isn't really internalizing the stakes of everything, just because he's he's so he's got his his hands in so many different worlds, and how how could you be so directly connected personally to all of the issues? But it's interesting because the the value that is missing from the conversation around AI, just to reiterate what you were saying, is the the value of the collective or the understanding of politics as a set of activities where collectives are really the the unit of participation and the the target of particular activities that is where we need to be focusing rather than individuals. And we're sort of losing that, and there is not nearly enough conversation, I agree, around what it means to be and to think from the perspective of a collective rather than an individual. And this is exacerbated, not just by AI, but in my opinion, by all forms of digitally mediated communication. And at the same time, as you were just saying, the people who seem to be the most aware of this and most committed to talking about this are operating in very high context areas. Many, if not most of them, sometimes it feels like all of them are in academia. Or if they're not in academia, they are in communities where there's a lot of signaling that can make other people feel excluded, like intellectual communities and so on. But your work is much more open than that. What you've been trying to do with the Future Narratives Lab, the way that we both got connected, has a lot to do with trying to bring these conversations out into the public. And of course, we're doing this on a very public-fleacing platform. This is not just a product for academics. So I wonder if you could speak about that a little bit, how your actual work rhymes with your theoretical and political commitments.

SPEAKER_02 18:19

Yeah, that's a great question. I think, yeah, and it does maybe in the in the course of writing this, I maybe didn't follow these threads and I didn't necessarily kind of quite understand how it flowed from or connected with the other work that I was doing, as much as it was a piece of analysis where I was like, okay, this seems to be how I would explain this situation. But I think now I have a much better understanding of it, something that does come from the broader way that I'm approaching things and from the general kind of theoretical methodological approaches that we take. And so I think, yeah, exactly as you say. My background, I should say, is like I have been in academia. Sorry if there's a bit of background, but I've I did a bachelor's degree and I've done a master's degree, but with a big gap in between. And it was it's now almost 15 years since my last there, and I haven't spent so I didn't spend much time in academia, and I certainly don't have much of a background in many of these topics in the sense of like thinking about technology. I guess you might say sociology might be an aspect of this, anthropology, all these different kinds of disciplines. And so I think obviously that makes me feel sometimes a sense of imposter syndrome in writing about this stuff with wanting to like feel legitimate in making these sort of comments. But I think it also allows me to maybe be a bit more flexible in terms of not being totally committed to one particular tradition or kind of frame of reference to come from it. And I and I do think that you're correct, Stevie, that sometimes these kinds of analyses and that are not necessarily super complex in the distinctions they're making, but they can be buried under the specific kind of complexity that emerges from a field, kind of coming to this insight and then building on it and constructing and having a whole kind of thing that then it doesn't make its way into public discourse. And where sort of future narratives lab, I suppose, in our work, one of the things that we increasingly as ourselves is trying to do is try and excavate from those insights that maybe academia has discovered, and often there are many of them, and then connect that up with that kind of public conversation or translate them into a place where they can be like, okay, this is a different way of understanding the world, or this is a different way of explaining why things are happening. And I think obviously I should say I think that's a difficult thing to do because precisely where that would take place, that kind of collective sense-making, you could call it, or that kind of theorizing, public theorizing, or public thinking about these topics would be in that domain of civil society. And yet, actually, the reality of the civil society is it's as it is today in the Western world at least, I think is one of like a very professionalized, relatively elite sphere of like organizations where with salary professionals talking to each other about their jobs, which is itself then driven by like professional incentives and dynamics. And so it is difficult to make that a space for sort of discussing theory and translating and understanding things as they're going on. We do our best to do that, and I think increasingly see that as like what we're we're there for, for charitable lab, in part at least, is to try and make that connection. But we we actually held an event just about a month ago, a couple of months ago, which was specifically bringing together academics and people in civil society every day to look at the kind of theoretical methodological approaches that there are there is in civil society and try to bridge that gap and get to fit to talk critically about that. Because my observation has been if I'm giving a limited amount of time in academia, and then a lot more time in civil society, is that academia is so theory rich and dense, and yet civil society as it is has almost no theory at all. Like there is very is very, very thin. Very difficult to be fair because when do you have the time, when do you have the justification to think about this? There are these dominant methodologies and kind of dynamics, I suppose, incentives in civil society spaces that are quite commercialized processes and they are quite hostile to theory. It's about outputs, it's about measurement, it's about showing impact in a way that you can you've got a bottom line, it may not be a bottom line that can be measured and aggregated. And again, we're coming back to sort of deification is one way of describing the kind of hostility to theory, to politics as I see it. And so we do our best to kind of create a space to have this, but it's not something we our model for operating is not, we're not yet funded to do that. Like we are funded by delivering other things to other nonprofits within our space, which you know, and we hope that those things will contribute to this space directly and indirectly. But I think that gap very wide between civil society and academia, and certainly between academia and the public. And different people are doing different things to bridge that gap, obviously. Many academics work very hard to translate things into the public conversation. But I think the nature of civil society today is one of the biggest blockers to that happening. Because I think we don't have these uh collective mass associations or these even these kind of regular uh institutions of everyday life that people are members of joining together, where they, as it says, and we've got power to pay the places where you work out the political identities, the places where you do like discuss, debate these things. But that's taking place online, obviously a way that is suboptimal in many respects. And so I think that sort of form of civil society is fairly rare, and therefore the challenges bridging that gap is even greater. But I think ultimately that is the gap that needs to be ridged on all of these issues.

SPEAKER_00 24:03

Yeah, thank you, Daniel. As we continue to have these discussions about artificial intelligence, its effect upon the mass of people, and what alternatives to not only things like education and academia look like, but the potential positive use or integration of artificial intelligence technologies into society. I would say with each conversation, my skepticism grows about how that is to be done. One thing that we're seeing, and I think one thing that Emma and I are absolutely immersed in at the moment, is this ongoing battle, one that you've sort of painted a picture of here, which is the collapse of traditional institutions of academia. It's almost as if a centrifuge is being run, where on one end of the tube we have a collection of academics who've been deemed a kind of excess to the university as it collapsed. Like when departments are are imploding and they have nowhere to go, they seek out spaces like ours or online collectives as a way to sort of reorganize and consider how they might continue with not only their personal research, but how do we develop forms of social pedagogy in the absence of those collapsing institutions? On the other side of that centrifuge, we have what's happening with artificial intelligence and the kind of learner and the kind of person who engages with AI who might not be prone to thinking in terms of theory or even academic topics, or perhaps they're just using AI for recipes and things like that. Regardless, even if you are an academic using AI for your work, the way that it's been deployed as a kind of consumer product is to create a solipsistic subject, somebody who's kind of like locked in this space. But on the obverse of that, solipsism are the machinations of a surveillance apparatus. And it's almost ironic in some sense that we have these solipsistic cells being developed in virtue of the technologies that are being promulgated as consumer products. And on the other side of that, consumption at the level of institutions, governments, and what have you, they are using the data that is mined from artificial intelligence as a means to not only enhance productivity, performance, but also things like surveillance. And I would say that my continued and growing skepticism about how we would establish a new politics and a new concept of a polity with the fact that AI is already upon us. It seems like there are two avenues, a sort of compatibilist or integrationist avenue. Like how can we use these technologies towards positive ends? And I have to say, as a personal user of like Google Chrome, for example, I have now become inured to the fact that, well, the first results that populate happen to be AI produced. And I'm looking at them, and whether or not I'm actually utilizing them is another question. But it's something that's slowly being burned into to all of us. The other path is a complete abolition, a sort of luddie implosion of all these technologies and abandoning of them that almost has a kind of religious accent to it. And there's a very sort of strong and I would say strict sense of morality that's also burgeoning around AI discourse that I think is partly dangerous too, and is being commodified in certain ways. AI witch hunts, for example. Did you or did you not use artificial intelligence for your research project or your blog piece or what have you? And Substack recently deployed a new way of hunting down things that were written either entirely or predominantly by AI. And as we know, the models for the detection of AI, whether it be one's writing or music, are severely flawed in some cases. I remember I ran a paper that I wrote as an undergrad 20 years ago into an AI platform to see how much of it was AI generated, that it said something on the order of like 30 to 40 percent. So if revolutionary politics in 2026 grew and engendered the form of success that would allow collectives to fight the powers that be and have a referendum on the kinds of policies and technologies that are being imposed by tech venture capitalists who are forcing AI on us. What would an aftermath look like to you?

SPEAKER_02 28:51

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a few different ways I could answer that. I think I mean I would say that probably I don't necessarily subscribe fully to like any one like single kind of like existing common like response to AI as a whole subject. I think in some ways my argument would be that like the idea that there is a single thing called AI and that there is one response that we can have to it as a whole is part of the issue. And I I guess what I mean by that is it and explaining the case bit is that like I feel like underlying AI are things that have been there for a long time and have driven gods to this point and that have put and particularly that have prevented us from doing anything about it, right? Like I think that the desire, like that the things that we hate about AI that we see, and people do largely dislike it on a societal level, certainly, even while using it on an individual level, like there was this growing dislike, are intensifications of the things that we've seen happening more and more in our life. And I suppose that like what I bring it all back to, if it has to be summarized in the concept is this idea of deification of that this is really just a manifestation of a process that's been happening for like even you could go back like a hundred years in the sense of like an increasing obsession with like measurement, management, and optimization of society, or even predate the sort of computerization, but obviously it was intensified by it. And then what you can see AI as then, or generative AI in particular, I suppose, but other forms of AI is like, well, what do we do with with all this data, or how can we extract as much as we can while gathering more? When that that sort of then what that ends up doing is shaping all the other aspects of our life. So you can see like ways in which all of our kind of personal even relationships and cultural the aspects of our culture and society are being kind of optimized and platformized in order to be able to extract more data about them or put them into places where you can use them to sort of sell advertising through them or kind of gather data that can then be used for other means. And so I think that that for me is an important is to almost say, like, where do we need to draw attention in being able to really understand where this is coming from, but also to be able to think about like what would it mean to actually kind of fundamentally be able to kind of push back against this? Because I think that like, although AI is certainly the like most extreme version of this that we've encountered, it feels like the that that it is actually continuous with like a history of this happening, which I think is is an under-recognized like deification. You I search on Google, right? I'll get an AI answer for this now. But like I remember like first coming across this term and searching for it on, I think on Google, and and whether I got an AI answer at that point, I think maybe not, but it was it was a positive articulation of that as something the business opportunity, right? It's not there are this, it's a fairly underused concept. And so I think whereas I think that actually it you can look at it and see it as really part of all of these different kinds of trends that I'm talking about, whether it's the sort of the dissipation of kind of collective power and of these institutions that you would need, I think, to be able to build up and force through any kind of political change on these issues. I think that's undermined through deification. I think I think it's part of the way that politics operates today, is it again itself very reliant on data and management and measurement and like it I see it as a thread which runs through kind of all of this and the real story. And I think ultimately to be able to kind of really build something different, fundamentally different, I think we'd have to address that root cause and look at like where is data coming from, where is it being produced, and and who by who does it belong to, how is the value created, who does it flow to? And I think we are a long way from that. And I think there's a kind of a cultural kind of conceptual issue there, which is a difficult kind of issue to solve because it's like who's it, whose responsibility is that? And I suppose maybe as we're talking before, it's it's kind of academics civil society to have work together, but it feels at the moment like that's something that's difficult to imagine. But but what I think fundamentally one of the big barriers is there is that the public concept of data, how most people think about it, is this sort of individual asset that we own, and that you just kind of it's a kind of trivial thing that you kind of generate without thinking about it, and then it either belongs to you or to someone else, and you should probably look after it because someone might steal your personal data, or you should trade it off for some benefits, and it's a totally individual conception of it as a thing. Whereas the reality is that the the actual value from data is data about the connections between us, so it doesn't belong to any one individual, it is in itself an inherent collective social thing. And this gap in understanding is exactly what's been exploited by these tech companies to just essentially unilaterally seize this data and and and create these platforms from it and create huge amounts of profit. Obviously, some of these things are more extreme than others, and in particular in the kind of cases there've been of them stealing large libraries of books and other things. They've had to be some settlements and so on. But but I think there's still also the fact that, like, because we don't have the sort of conceptual equipment to understand what it would mean for there to be a sort of collective, we don't we can't think about data in the ways that we need to be able to think about it in order to have the kind of institutions treat it in the way that it is. It's an inherently political thing. And so, although there are kind of attempts to build institutions like data trusts and things, or people have tried to move in this direction, it kind of hits up against this barrier of it. And and the tech companies have intentionally uh made this harder by promoting things like data security, data privacy, and so on, as the as other companies did with climate change space, was done with carbon footprints, recycling. Recycling was also an example of this in relation to plastic, where the responsibility was put on the individual with their own data. It's up to you, just get your security settings. There's some great examples of this. Once you've seen the advertising campaigns of tech companies, where they clearly, this is an important thing that they're trying to do, which is maintain this idea of personal responsibility around data because the individualistic frame of it is one that then doesn't challenge the emergence or it doesn't challenge the emergence of its kind of collective understandings that that might actually lead to change. So that's a long way around. But I think that like maybe the point in terms of how I we believe we need to respond is that like I I think like most people, we I exist in this same space of being like on a societal collective level, very increasingly and increasingly upset and angry about the way YC being done to society by these technologies in various domains as you've described. And then on an individual level, being like keen not to believe that I can like that I'm gonna change that by like not using these tools and or the by refusal. And I totally respect anyone who decides that that's how they want to approach it, and there are lots of good reasons to I'm not a heavy user of these tools, but I think ultimately I think what we will need to do if we are going to be able to, like whatever our problems with AR, and there are many people are doing different problems with AR, we are going to if we just respond to the controversial topics that come up, whether it's data centers or others, we can build a certain amount of collective power around that, but I think that power will be relatively ephemeral because we don't have these long-lasting institutions, these kind of bigger political bodies that can last longer and build power around collective interests, that we would then be able to need to force politics to be able to actually make AI in the way that we would want it to. I uh I think whether it's possible to for this kind of AI as it is to be shaped and still be recognizably the same thing to be uh democratic and and not extractive, I think is a good question that maybe I have the exact answer to, but I think it would almost certainly look very different because I suppose what what I'm saying in the paper specifically is that we see this as AI, this is a form of AI. This is a very specific form of AI that works in a specific way with particular incentives that produces certain outcomes, that encourages certain types of behaviors, and so on, and that is itself a result of a set of literal economic processes that have led us here, and so AI is another step in sort of technological development. And I think it's just to say that we would like shut, like destroy and burn and put away, it feels hard to imagine that that's possible. I'm not sure that we could really say that we've ever done that before with any technology. So I think what we really need to be aiming for is like can we change the underlying drivers that have led us to this form of AI and in the hope that that would lead to a different form of AI and it would also lead to a very aggressive pushback against all of the negative externalities of this form of AI. But I think that would require us to build new forms of collective institution, which is where I arrived at the end of the piece and make some sort of vague, vague gestures towards what that would look like, but I'm happy to happy to discuss well.

SPEAKER_00 39:07

Yeah, thank you. I I think the the one thing that you hit on that I tend to dwell on myself is what the larger conceptual shift looks like. Because even the the debates that we're having in the shadow of the catastrophe that is the current promulgation of the AI models and the LLMs in particular that we're experiencing now all circulate around certain terms that we're familiar with: productivity, property, assets, individuals, accounts. And all of those terms, I think, are terms that fall out of the language of capitalist modernity and the way that the notion of democracy has been pegged to that for so long, such that now, whatever sort of iteration of capitalism that we're living within right now is carrying behind it in a netted bag the shambles or the fragments of what we understood democracy wants to be. And I mean, it's also arguable that this process of the dismantling of whatever semblance of democracy that we had was probably here at least 10 to 15 years prior to the introduction of the LLMs. I'm thinking Citizens United in the United States being one case, one major case of that. I mean, there's always the socialist argument too, that there is no real democracy under capitalism. Regardless, I mean, one of the things that I tend to get stuck on is that even with the establishment of a concept of a collective, is that if we don't somehow transform our libidinal priors, I'll call them, all of the thoughts, impulses, almost an existential orientation to the world as it is now, I think we're left to, even in the remnants of the regime that now is putting forward the forms of artificial intelligence that we're dealing with now, a reorganization of those might end up recapitulating some of the exact presuppositions that brought them about. We can point to collectivity, but also I think something that's important to look at is the nature of the kind of Promethean shame that has now kind of transformed into a Promethean rage, not only in the way that we have been displaced by our own technologies, but solutions in some sense seem so far away from us. And it makes me wonder if we are so far down into the abyss that is the catastrophe, that we will just have to see this collapse either to its end or to a certain point where maybe some manner of rebuilding is possible. Maybe it needs to go all the way to the end. Maybe we can't stop it at this point without some significant sort of collapse or wake-up call. That seems nihilistic, right? It seems at some point that if if we are to make a collective intervention, it's going to require an incredible act of will. But once again, what does that look like against creating a world where we don't need something like a data center? When I look at what a data center is, both imagistically and conceptually, it's this monolithic structure that's literally humming and emanating heat in fields here in like the rural part of Pennsylvania where I live, that have no tolerance for the otherness of any form of species of insect, bird, or what have you. And I wonder if a progressive approach to artificial intelligence doesn't involve questioning the very basis of the necessity for something like that. And like you said, there are very few instances in history that I'm aware of where we've rolled back technology. There's one where I can think of in, I think it was in the 1500s or early 1600s in Japan, where they temporarily gave up on firearms and went back to blades, partly as a cultural reformation, but then they realized the growing necessity to have those sorts of things. But yeah, I wonder if you could if you have any any more responses to that. I mean, now that I've put forward the idea, like in your view of whatever artificial intelligence is or the reining in of this technology, do you have any sort of idea, like what that would look like in terms of the management and balance of the technological edifice against some of the ecological impacts and social impacts that it imposes on us?

SPEAKER_02 43:39

Yeah, I mean, I think in some ways you could say that like I think that your revulsion of the idea of a data center is is widely shared, right? I think if you think there's very few things that like politically unite people across the world today and in different coming from very different political traditions, but one of the things that does seem to be uniting people in various places is. Sense of like, well, I don't want this fast, sort of like anonymous monolith, like you say, coming and consuming war and electricity. No, that's no, we don't want that. So I think that in itself does suggest that there is, it's we're reaching a point of extremity in some senses that like is is producing this kind of like visceral reaction that sort of transcends the kind of more what we we saw as these like kind of deep, so deeply seated political divisions. Clearly, many other ways kind of seem to totally overcome experience and self-interest and logic. But but this thing of like, oh no, actually, in my area, they're suddenly going to build this enormous sort of inhuman bluff that's just there, that's imposed down from above with totally kind of abstract benefits attached to it. So I think that there is in in that way, like a the reality of AI on a kind of practical level for people is producing these kind of reactions. But that is, of course, I mean, at the moment, limited to the places in which that's happening and or not experiencing that directly, I can all have a general sense of material approach, but maybe not quite as strong. I think in terms of the kind of the my sense of whether there's a how possible it is that we can we can kind of rein this in and what that would look like, I suppose I kind of I'd go back and forth between it because I think that on the one hand, I can totally understand pessimism, because I think that as I say, when you look at this as a longer-term historical process in which we'll say there's there's not only the kind of like, yeah, the economical and kind of political institutional aspect which I focus on, but like say the kind of cultural build-up of like resentment and frustration and the kind of pain that has led to this sort of like situation that we were in, like we say, pre pre-LLMs, which has has contributed to this and the kind of political breakdown that there's been, it does leave me feeling kind of pessimistic about any sort of of change or improvement on this or any other issues. And you kind of think, well, maybe it does all need to fall apart in order to for there to be something better built. It's hard, it's hard to imagine a kind of moderated version of what we have. So it's it really being anything that's worth having, really. I think on on the other hand, though, I think, and it's not to say that I have like a kind of optimistic point of view, but I suppose one of the things that kind of for me has come out of like this seeing going back to what we talked about in the beginning, is these sort of where you see kind of ideas that are just kind of absent. This the fact that we are not like discussing or thinking about political institutions, collective bodies of which people can form together in self-interest in order to kind of build collective power, these things that seem like very obvious constituent parts of what we need. The fact that they're not, it's not like these things have been, we've really made a big effort to do this and it's failed. Like we had these things that had emerged, I think, relatively organically. And we can we argue over that how the kind of positive and negative aspects of them, but I think there was a point at which we had these much bigger institutions, representative democratic institutions, associations on a mass level, you know, whether those were around kind of class-based institutions, like particularly religious, often other kind of vocational things, that there were bodies which had enough power to like really impose themselves on politics, and those have dissipated and gone away. We don't have them anymore. And there's lots of reasons for that. I would display gayfication, unsurprisingly, is one of those reasons, but I think it's also a kind of you know, just a process of many of those identities on which they were based have themselves sort of dissipated, right? We don't have the same kind of working class identities that we did, we don't have the same kind of regional or religious identities that people did. But it seems like a big gap, like I and a gap in the sense not only that it's not being done, but we haven't really tried to address that problem in a very concerted way, I don't think. It's not something that feels like it's been acknowledged enough as an as an issue and as a fundamental issue. And so to that extent, I think I feel like, well, what if we tried, right? Like what? And it's not that something that's going to produce instant results and that in itself is a barrier. It's not something that's gonna lead to suddenly overnight we kind of get the regulation that fixes AI. But I think we need to stop thinking that I think we don't, we need to go back to the roots of like what do we actually what actually leads us to get to a point where we we collectively as people have political power separate from voting in an election every five years, right? Because that doesn't seem to produce very much. And that the politics we have is one of like atomization and and aggregation and no real intermediary bodies, and and that produces atomized individuals who have the kind of feelings that you described that then lead them to lash out in various directions. And I think that's partly a more simplistic way of describing what we see in terms of the leadership that we end up. And we may end up with I'd be it's really interesting to me that people have a few people started to write about obviously kind of anti-AI populist, what that looks like on a left-wing basis, or as people might expect it too, but even what a right-wing anti-AI populism might look like, which I think is there's nothing to say that that wouldn't happen. I mean, obviously the the right have more tended to more ally themselves with big business, and there's an enormous amount of money being spent, particularly in in the US, on trying to keep that alliance and spread it and scare off anyone from thinking about it. But obviously, public opinion is very negative about many of its AI companies. And so there is an incentive there, and there are lots of conservative traditions, religious traditions, which are totally opposed to what AI as it is represents. So I think that's a possibility of something that might happen, opportunistic kind of anti-AI takes. What does that mean? Do you know is the question, I suppose. Like, what does it mean in terms of the kinds of regulation, the kinds of law that might come in? How does that then dynamic play out with like geopolitics as well, which is obviously one of the major justifications that it's continues to drive this, is falling back on this idea of like, well, we can't really do it any less. You might hate it, but we have to just let them do what they want, because otherwise China will win, right? And that's I guess where I start from with the whole piece of this sort of idea, this really absurd idea of democratic AR that uh sort of have adopted. Um they will obviously as go for whatever justification they can to continue to get this the huge kind of leeway that they're given to do this massive expansion on the promise of a kind of future in which that will translate to an unimaginable kind of wealth and winning. But yeah, I think I it's it's hard to see how that is gonna last really, because I think that yeah, I either they're right in the sense that they will be able to abuse something, in which case all bets are off, but I think much more like you will just see growing dissatisfaction and upset, and you will see people responding to that and as you always do, and then but I think I'm let again, I think that I I wouldn't want to predict where that goes. I think that's an interesting question. I'd like to see some people speculate on, but I think as I say, ultimately that we if we want to solve the problem that led to this and really shape the future actually in our interests rather than just sort of lash back against things, I think we need to think about institutional like renewal. And where I arrive at the end of the piece is that the way we do that is by thinking about data, it's by thinking about what forms of renewance, where are our self-interests gathering? And and I think it is in this question of data. And I think we need to try and imagine what it would look like to kind of build new forms of institution basing. But again, that's that for me is is hopeful in itself, I suppose. Like that maybe we don't have time to have this like think about it and develop it and so on. But I think that the fact that we've unjust started to me is it suggests that like there's a lot of room for improvement.

SPEAKER_01 52:41

Well, I'm personally really skeptical of the idea of an anti-AI populism or an anti-tech populism. And I say that as somebody who has been working as a tech critic in various contexts, as an academic, as a journalist, as somebody writing for non-academic readerships for a long time. The recent tech backlash that we've been seeing as exemplified by the summer of Lud activities in New York, or I think their intentions are really good. I don't feel so strongly about it that I'd I'd want to make a big deal out of it. But my my concerns with that approach are theoretical, and some of them are echoed in your paper. And I want to read another quote that is related to what you were just talking about, and maybe use this as an entry point into a discussion about what we can really do to build these new institutions, if it's possible at all. And I kind of go back and forth. Sometimes I'm a little bit more of a doomer. I heard some of my own sentiments echoed in what Craig was saying a few moments ago about how little time we have left, really, and what's really going on ecologically. And sometimes I wonder if the only way out is through in a dark sense. And then there are other days where I feel a bit more optimistic. But this question of how we actually begin to rebuild something that feels like a more genuinely constructive politics, even if I don't have perfect faith in it, I think it's an important one to sit with. So to that end, here's the quote. This is from page four of the essay. As defined in the 2021 book of the same name, techno-populism diagnoses a fundamental mistaken assumption that traps our political imagination. The idea that democratic politics consists only of a contest and choice between two opposite dueling poles, expert-led technocracy or populist demagoguery. In truth, rather than being the opposites, they are presented as. Technocracy and populism have a great deal in common to the extent that much of democratic politics today actually consists of varying combinations of the two, differing only in the exact mix. Both at heart are quote unquote politics of truth, appealing to a principle supposedly above politics. In the case of populists, the will of the people, in the case of technocrats, the objective, quote unquote objective evidence of what works, measured through the metrics of science or business. Through such appeals, they claim representation of the political whole and are therefore inherently hostile to any parts that might claim to act on interests of particular elements or groups within society, and thus to any form of political grouping, process, or representation that might challenge their role. So this idea of a politics of truth is really important here, I think. Both the populists that would stage uh a coup against the technocrats running our society and the technocrats are operating on the same premise, which is that there is a form of rectitude. Then you are indeed representing the whole and you have the right to act on behalf of the people. For the technocrats, and this is just putting what you were writing in different words, it's all about getting scientific evidence in accordance with some objective criteria. You you can prove that so many people are using your tools, you can prove that you're you're great at business, which means you're able to thrive under our current political economic conditions, and therefore you have the right to kind of act as kings and queens, which is what's happening with the tech right, certainly in the United States today and in other places. And for the populists, they get to say, oh, well, well, we're we're the real people. We really understand what's going on. We're really in touch with the will of the people. And again, it's it's this logic of like you either know it or you don't, and it's a binary, it's framed as a binary. And it's interesting how this logic follows through to AI criticism, even AI criticism that doesn't take a particularly populist bend. But the idea of critiquing AI on the basis of arguing that AI generated outputs are either true or false, or either good or bad, which we see constantly, is okay, we're we're trying to get these detectors for AI-generated misinformation. People make arguments about the quality of AI-generated art that in in principle they can't really lead anywhere because that's this is just boils down to matters of taste, basically. And it it is pretty striking that we seem to be caught in this deadlock. And this is this is part of the reason that a lot of mainstream AI criticism to me is not only not effective, it's actually doing doing the very work that it claims to be against. It's just the the level on which it's doing that is is sort of deep. And the only way we can really express it is theoretically, which makes it sort of frustrating if you're trying to have these conversations outside of an academic setting. So then, okay, this is the thing that I started with. Knowing all of this, if we're pretty serious about wanting to build new collectives and new institutions, I think we are going to have to take into account what Craig was saying, where our lividinal priors have been hijacked, our thoughts, our feelings very deeply shaped by the isolating conditions of technological capitalism. The question that I would put out there is are we going to have to build new institutions and new groups from the ground up, taking all sorts of things into consideration that were not taken into consideration, let's say, when we established higher ed as an example of an institution, or anything to do with our electoral politics? Or is it possible to preserve all of that, but to still instantiate, which I think we all agree would have to be a really fundamental shift. Where do we actually begin this work if we're taking all of this stuff seriously?

SPEAKER_02 1:00:00

Yeah, I mean, I'll start, I'll maybe I'll start talking a little bit about technopopulus, kind of like I think, because I no, I think that that is a really core thing. I'm glad you brought up the politics of truth piece in particular. Like interestingly, the the binarization that was actually in one of the earlier drafts of this piece at the beginning, where I was talking about the nature of AI discourse and the fact, the way that it's remarkable how across like policy settings or even on videos on the YouTube, you know, random videos on the YouTube, so often the question about AI screening is like, will AI help us for harness? You know, that there is like the vision there is that, like, well, it's happening, right? And we we just have to sort of see what happens as a spectator and speculate about what the future is gonna be, and like that it's like then you will know. And obviously, that has some interesting relations to the whole kind of like betting things that's obviously becoming ever more extreme at the moment as well. That idea that like our relation is to politicians as this sort of individual who can like invest state like outcomes, but like rather than it be something where we might actually say no on the basis of a shared interest that might actually act to change what happens. But I think techno-populism for me was like a really important part of this. And I think it's it is another example, as you described earlier, of the piece of work of Henry Forell and Marie Hahn. I think a book that's like an idea within a book that's maybe sort of like trapped within an academic sort of conception, and and the structure of the book itself is very expensive, academic book, and quite dense, I think, and focuses very much on sort of literal parties. But I think and I think in a way, I would even argue in some senses that I don't think the authors really understand the kind of maybe they understand, but like I don't think they've been necessarily fully realized the sort of for me, the kind of breadth of what they've identified. It's very focused on like political parties and the nature and structure of political parties in Western Europe. Even the name itself is like kind of confusing when I first heard it. I think it's not really a good name because people think initially, oh, well, you just mean like populism by technologists, right? Obviously, that's just like Elon Musk and whatever. And then it's like, well, that's not a new thing. Why should I be interested in that? Whereas for me, I think what it really uh really helps to uncover is like, well, how are we trapped in this specific kind of anti-political logic? What is it that is the sort of paradigm that keeps us there? And it is about the fact that like we think we're going back and forth on a spectrum between two, or trying to find the nice middle ground between two things that are opposed. And in fact, they're sort of symbiotic, that really like all of these the technocratic of supposedly technocratic parties are also populist in their own way, and all of the populists are sort of technocratic in their own way, they're all doing just variations of it. And what they have in common is much more powerful than what's actually opposed. They might be opposed in the nature of trying to win power, but they all operate within this logic, which is ultimately about trying to escape politics, about real hostility. They talk about the whole versus the parts, right? They don't want, they want everyone to identify on the level of the mass aggregate, like the people, the public, right? You don't want to think about individual groupings with their own self-interests. That's something that's sort of like that is kind of antithetical to the whole thing. So it's that's where things like these samples of the public come from. You want to kind of take the public as a whole, demographically, statistically represented as if it's a whole thing. It doesn't, you know, my view. I don't I say this to people, I don't think the public exists, I don't think it's a thing. It's no substructive if we don't interact in a way where that's a meaningly cohesive thing, right? There is you could to say that you can kind of represent through just statistically pulling out a number of people who demographically seem to be an example, and then take that as legitimating what the views of those people are of thinking. And so the technopolitic, the technopopulism, both of those kind of points of view, or wherever you fall within that, is is itself the kind of the thing that I think is trapping us. And I know as soon as I saw this and kind of this kind of really realized what it was identifying, I started to see it everywhere, and I think particularly in the civil society space, which is not something that the book talks about, to see this like this combinations of as well. So not only that there are like technocratic aspects to civil society, which is obvious, but also you have this sort of vague combination between these sort of like really vague, collective, apolitical, aspirational things with a very technical outcome. And so the example I give in the essay is social innovation, it's like well, social what, right? Because how is this an expression of some sort of aspirational good positive, but it has no content? Like, what does that mean to be social? Like, you're not you're not taking any side there, you're just sort of saying that well, we just kind of all the best thing is if we don't worry about what we mean by that, and we just all achieve full good, right? Full good is another. I actually wrote a glossary of terms of of techno-populism in civil society, which is sort of hidden behind a paywall in a very obscure journal at the moment. But I think I now see this everywhere of this sort of that it's fuses our like language as well that is used within civil society spaces, particular of like these combinations of like either scientific or like business-based claims on like technical output knowledge with these very broad, vague claims to like positive outcome without making any reference to a particular grouping. And so in that sense, I think like technical populism for me is even though it's not necessarily the most helpful concept, I think it's important in sort of explaining like why and how we remain trapped. Within this paradigm, already start our kind of discourse about politics remains trapped. And I think it does start to point the way towards like, well, that actually, like, again, like I don't want to be like repetitive in the sense of saying, well, it's positive that we're we're only just getting started. It's not really what I'm saying. But I think that that again is not something that seems to be, we haven't developed the language to talk about even this problem and identify it. It's totally absent from really from the conversation about what's wrong. I think, even within deep deeper or critiquing politics and democracy and so on, made a I think a reasonable little splash when it came out as the book, but it was fairly narrow in scope and it hasn't in some ways taken on. There have been ideas recently, like Anton Jaeger's book on hyperpolitics start to sort of like get into the same sort of territory. But I think there hasn't really been nearly enough work to try and disation of say civil society in particular as like a major part of the problem that we're wanting to solve. And what that would point to in terms of the solution is obviously to think about well, what would it mean to repoliticise civil society to make it to move it away from has been on this journey that I described and was described by others, particularly Peter Scott's work, of going from mass representative membership associations towards this sort of professionalized managerial kind of philanthropy-dependent thrust as it's described. And I think thinking about how to reverse that, I think, particularly has to be a particular priority. And if you look, this is something people are starting to do, but if you look at the difference in the nature of those types of organizations, so obviously they they did, they were based on kind of identified collective economic shared interests that we have to identify. I think we we have that in some senses in AI to start to see this be emerging with the threats that there are to people's jobs. At the moment, I think that's quite diffuse. It's like the threats are maybe with graduates, threats are maybe with programmers. It's not really crystallized yet to like the specifics of who might be most threatened by the transformations that are coming. But I think you also another part of it has to be the nature of the funding for these organizations. Like we've got used to civil society being this thing that is ultimately dependent on philanthropy. And philanthropy spends a lot of time complaining about this. So I think they're very aware that that's not a healthy thing. But there's all too little work being done to think about what it would mean to try and rebuild kind of organizations that are independent, that are building, convincing people to put money regularly into supporting an institution that represents their collective interests. That's not easy, but then that is also the same thing that everyone is trying to do for everything at the moment, right? Which is thinking about subscriptions and people to sign up. Like it's not impossible. People put a lot of money in. And I think sometimes there is a bit too much fatalism about the idea that like that that anyone could do that. Just and that's I think itself a kind of cultural thing we have to overcome, is the idea that like, oh no, that that would never happen. I mean, there are huge waves of people who do put large amounts of money into all sorts of institutions and um subscribe to various things and donate to politics large massive amounts of money, sometimes in small amounts but very large amounts of people. Or I think if you can start to build institutions that can last a little bit longer and that people can feel like they have a genuine democratic say in what happens, then I think you could start to build those sort of layers of mediation. But but it is operating in a super hostile environment, totally except. And so I think the new, you know that's that's that's the the sort of dilemma that we have is that we're in this situation of of real urgency in various senses, but we're trying to do something which is necessarily a process, a patient process of sort of swimming against the tide and trying to construct things in a new situation that sort of and try things out because like we don't know what will work because we're in a totally different environment now to what we were. Yeah, many of the sort of foundations that were there that were necessary for these things to be built in the first place are now completely absent. So it's what what can be constructed has to be got, but we're not we're not really trying yet. So I think I feel like if we could make this part of the conversation and realize that this was this needed to be the priority, then I think there is still a huge amount of resource and effort that's being directed to try and achieve what needs to be achieved, but it's just being directed elsewhere. So I think that there is there is opportunity then to try and make this happen on a much bigger scale, but it we need to influence these conversations to start to realize that.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:05

I think a lot about the role of money in these endeavors. I I had seen the program for the conference that you mentioned earlier, Dan, which, as you said, brought together academics with people who were definitely not academics, and there was a panel about philanthropy. And if I had been able to participate, I would have been very interested in seeing that panel. The landscape for philanthropy in the United States is not quite what it is in the UK and the EU, but there are similar concerns. I mean, right now, as I'm trying to get an organization off the ground and figuring out how to actually make it work financially and what our relationship with patrons will be is one of the hardest parts. We are trying to at the risk of being really corny, the change that we want to see in the world, you know, we're we are trying to kind of do this work of building the new in the shell of the old and the projects that's around acid horizon. Although I'll only speak for the way that I see it, I don't want to speak for anybody else, but there's this element of not just doing something different in the sense of the content that we're putting out there, but also the form, but then actually getting it to have legs of its own and not at the point where it's difficult to really do the work because you're so worried about basic survival is really an issue. And then given the political commitments of everybody who's involved in these things, it's not necessarily an easy conversation about how to make it financially solvent. I often think about these projects from the perspective of relationship management, because in a more conventional, ossified sort of institution, people have roles and capacities, and those roles define the way that you relate to each other. And this is very important. When I was a traditional academic, I knew that speaking with my department chair was very different from speaking with the lecturers in my department who were technically at a lower rank than I, even though you treat everyone the same in some sense. There, there are these meaningful differences, and that's all different from how I speak to my students or how I speak to the dean of the college. And that can be extrapolated to all sorts of more traditional environments, whether it's higher ed or something else, the world of NGOs as it has existed for decades, right? But when you're doing something new, how you actually relate to people is not quite as clear. And it's it's something I've been navigating all year as I've been moving away from the traditional structures, working in these sort of para-academic organizations and with people building organizations that are are hard to make legible sometimes to the outside. So there's that piece of it, but money is not separate from that conversation. And just to be very blunt about it, most of the people that I'm thinking about and most of these projects are full of people who would identify as anti-capitalists, regardless of the more specific label they put on that. Some of them are anarchists who are having very, very different conversations about institutions and might not accept the term democracy at all. Some of them are electoral politics, sort of left-winging folks. But in any case, nobody's out to get extremely wealthy. No one's out to become the next billionaire or even anything close. But the the thought that I have is do we need to maybe think about money a bit differently than we're used to as people who don't like the idea that financial logics dominate? Is there something? Are we thinking perhaps that it's too crass to be asking people for money? Are we too put off by those who have it? Is there a way to maybe bring it into the conversation that even though perhaps we'd be making a bigger deal out of it explicitly, it actually also says that it just is what it is. It doesn't have to be the capitalist idea, is that the most precious things in life have nothing to do with money. And I actually think there's a very anti-capitalist way of arguing that no, you actually do need money for everything, and you can't really have happiness without it. Sorry that this is a bit unfocused, but we're speaking in very practical terms about how we how we build away from where we are now. I think that this is this is something that needs to be addressed.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:05

No, I completely agree, and I do think that like it's a difficult thing to like articulate in a way because I think again it's an area where I think there's far too little work has been done, which I think in itself says something, right? Like we were, I was thinking about a colleague of mine who's written about some of these things, kind of coming from more of a kind of grassroots community economic kind of perspective, but thinking very much also about like institution building and the nature of civil society, an organization called Survey Action that I'm involved with. And yeah, I think we were like thinking about the financing question, because I think as soon as you start to identify this pattern of like philanthropy dependence and so on, you realize that okay, well, that's change, right? It's the change of where the money's comfortable, partly what's resulted, and to what extent you can kind of put the causal sequencing of this of like leading to a kind of weakened civil society because it's philanthropy dependent, or that it became philanthropy dependent because it's weakened. Or I don't think that necessarily matters too much, but I think that like we're in the situation that we're in, and I think certainly think one of the things that does need to be worked out in order to escape it is to think very carefully about money. And I do think there are some quite definitely some deep kind of cultural, personal, emotional level things there of like, because obviously it is like money ultimately is all of those things, and I think you're also right that there's something that we need to have a kind of say we have a conversation about, but we need to work out what to to do with the degree to which in our kind of in like left political spaces, this sort of distaste for money on a kind of a personal level, and I suppose also business. And I think that that's an entrepreneurship. And I think that those things are things which obviously we need to say what we mean by those, and I wouldn't want to pretend I have any particular expertise or knowledge about that, but I think that I just think, yeah, the reality is that there is a that's the sort of always the background to well everything, right? Is there's always these questions of how is these things being funded, where is the money coming from, where is it going to come from? What is the model? This is we're not often those things, but they are just, I think, seen as being like, well, things we have to put up with, but not really think constructively about or really surface and and discuss. And I think that actually that that's probably a big thing that we do have to overcome if we're going to actually look at these new forms of institution properly. I think even part of it is to do with like altruism and sort of self-interest. I haven't really I don't have fully developed thoughts around this yet, I have to say, but like for me, there is definitely something there as well, where like the we see there seems to be for me a lot of the spaces that I'm in that kind of a distaste with like offering things to people if for money that are in their own self-interest, that they you would you would give someone something because it's good for them, and they would choose to get it because it's good for them, right? Rather than it being preferring to be like sort of okay, well, you should donate to us for an altruistic reason, or we should do it on behalf of somebody else, or like that that somehow it's kind of selfish or cheap to have some sort of transactional thing where it's like, no, actually, you as a person in this situation should put money into what we're doing because it will benefit. And I think if you look at like, I suppose sort of trade unions are often the kind of bridge here between what a mass associational representative body look like and what we have now, and obviously the dues that go from union members are in part people saying, Well, I will get a benefit. And and I think that that is fairly unusual. You don't really see that. And I guess because it's become seen as part of being like a business you're sort of commercializing, you're or like if you start to like do something that people want to buy from you for themselves, that that's like antithetical to some sort of like social mission. And so I think partly there is something going on there quite fundamental around thinking about what it would look like to have models that do look like businesses and do trade, do things like that, and that be sustaining in that way, and then maybe in doing so achieve the goals that we want to and the or raise money that way. There are there are bodies I think that do do this. The problem is that I think a lot of the time that kind of thinking gets subsumed into this kind of technical populisty idea of like social enterprise or whatever, where in reality what you have is like corporate businesses with very few restrictions on what they can do, essentially like giving away a little bit of money to charity. So they're not really like transcending that paradigm, they're just sort of layering on top of it. And so, yeah, it's a difficult space. I wouldn't pretend that I've done enough thinking to have kind of a fully worked out idea, but I think I do think you're absolutely right that we need to work that out and kind of get into that analysis of how do we manage the relationships within organizations, between organizations and their members or customers or whatever they are. What are we offering? What are we expecting? I do think there's an opportunity in the moment, the kind of current moment of changing kind of financial relationships have things, particularly online. That is like Patreons or subscriptions or whatever it is, like different things that are happening where people's kind of have changed the way that they what they're paying for and why and how. Obviously, the the dynamics of that are shaped very much by these platforms, which themselves are antithetical to what we're trying to achieve. But I don't I still think that it does mean that people maybe are a little bit more open to this than if you went back like living 10 years, certainly like 20 years ago. I think this would have been a much more difficult thing to imagine trying to try and create some sort of financial dynamic.