Heart UK

The Honest Broker Podcast

The Honest Broker features in-depth conversations with the leading thinkers and writers of our time. It is a partnership between host Jared Henderson and culture critic Ted Gioia at The Honest Broker, a newsletter covering arts, culture, and media. <br/><br/><a href="https://www.honest-broker.com?utm_medium=podcast">www.honest-broker.com</a>

Jared Henderson

Welcome back to The Honest Broker interview series —also available on our YouTube channel. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms.Today, I’m pleased to share my conversation with Lowry Pressly.Please support The Honest Broker by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).Lowry Pressly is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University.  He holds a PhD from Harvard University and a JD from Yale Law School. He is the author of The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life, which was named by The New Yorker as one of the best new books of 2024. I invited Lowry to join me in Austin, and we sat down to have a conversation about data, surveillance, and the role of privacy in a flourishing human life. Below are highlights from our conversation. For the full dialogue, check out the video at the top of the page. A CONVERSATION WITH LOWRY PRESSLYJared: When most people think about privacy, it’s purely in terms of apps and websites and tech companies. We even have this nomenclature of privacy settings—how private a person you are is almost measurable by how many of those features you turn on. Is that too narrow an understanding?Lowry: Without a doubt. The idea of privacy as something important to human beings as such doesn’t emerge in the public consciousness until the middle of the nineteenth century, as a reaction primarily to the photograph camera and the first mass media. The danger today is thinking of privacy through the lens of privacy settings. One, it gives us the wrong idea of what privacy is—deciding the audiences for your information is better described as confidentiality or secrecy. Two, and this is the dangerous one: the camera and the newspaper weren’t part of an economic system whose profit motive was tied to the diminution of privacy. When we use the technologies of the data economy to think about privacy, we take for granted that what Mark Zuckerberg calls privacy settings track the reality of what privacy is—and not the reality of his business model.“Not long ago, within my lifetime, it would have been an unbelievable dystopia to portray a world in which video surveillance is more or less everywhere and each person voluntarily carries an individual tracking device.”Jared: So let’s go back to the camera. Did we invent privacy as a right in response to it, or did it just make salient something we’d ignored?Lowry: A bit of yes and a bit of no. The word goes back to the 1500s—the privy council, private correspondence. But it isn’t used to describe an interest human beings have just by virtue of being human until the mid-nineteenth century. The big moral panic has to do with cameras: 1888 was George Eastman’s Kodak, which made candid shots possible for the first time. And note the language of candid—it normally means freely expressing oneself, and now we naturally use it for photographs.One of the first legal cases to try to vindicate a right to privacy was a woman whose picture was taken on stage by a paying member of the audience. The judge said this was a moral violation of privacy—sadly, we have no law to cover it. That’s later taken up in the famous 1890 Warren and Brandeis article. What worried people weren’t illicit exposures but candid ones—taking a moment out of the flux and flow of life as it’s lived and fixing it in a permanent form. There’s a continuum—being looked at, the person taking notes about you, the photograph. The question is, what moves us along it?Jared: Here’s a case I don’t have strong feelings about. Imagine I’m eating lunch in a park and discover someone at the next bench has been making a charcoal drawing of me. I don’t have as strong an aversion to that. The person sketching is providing an interpretation of your presence rather than just grabbing the moment. Whereas the more factual it becomes—12:01, took a bite; 12:02, picked his nose—the worse it feels.Lowry: The charcoal drawing says at least as much about the artist as about you. The list isn’t interpretive. And that goes to what really bothered people about the camera. It creates an image that seems to bypass human interpretation—people called it the mirror of nature, nature’s pencil. It makes a claim to objectivity. And there was a belief, which we still have, that a person’s image—particularly the face—expresses what this person is really like. What the camera seemed to do was to speak from your heart for you. The thing that’s harmed, in the Warren and Brandeis article, is inviolate personality—and inviolate doesn’t mean inviolable. It means sacred. This is a line past which people shouldn’t cross.Jared: Now you should pretty much always assume you’re being recorded. And it goes well past images. There are settings in Google where you can find out what Google thinks all of your interests are. The first time I saw that, a lot of it was so wrong—Google thinks I like snowboarding, and I’ve maybe looked it up once in my life. But I had this sense of disturbance.Lowry: There’s an error in their dossier.Jared: But why is there a dossier? My interests change. Who I am changes. But this is a perfect record of everything I’ve ever been briefly interested in. I felt like a line in a bookkeeper’s balance sheet. I feel like I’m being compressed—and compression almost inevitably loses resolution. You know all this about me, but you don’t know me.Some people would say privacy is an outdated right, that we should embrace the post-privacy world. Are you fighting a losing battle?Lowry: You do hear people say privacy is dead, but it’s almost always someone who stands to profit from the death of privacy—famously, Mark Zuckerberg. This is a hopeful pitch. I teach a class of first-year Stanford students on privacy, and if any students are going to be post-privacy, it’s these. Invariably, they all value privacy. But the world has changed so radically. Not long ago, within my lifetime, it would have been an unbelievable dystopia to portray a world in which video surveillance is more or less everywhere and each person voluntarily carries an individual tracking device. Within living memory, people pointed to the GDR—or today, China’s surveillance state—as one of the most dehumanizing violations of human dignity imaginable. We’ve gone so quickly from seeing this as anathema to a free society to just the normal way of doing business. But these kids aren’t as credulous as we were. The problem is structural—you can opt out as an individual, but that leads to a feeling of impotence.Jared: And even if you opt out, other people keep documenting you. I don’t put my kids’ pictures on the internet, and it’s like a part-time job—a relative posts their picture and says, oh, it’s just for my Facebook friends. No, it’s on the internet now. Delete it. A good historical analogy is East Germany: it was the willingness of people to surveil each other that made the surveillance state possible. So opting out always feels a little futile.Lowry: This comes from Bentham’s Panopticon, later taken up by Foucault and the GDR authorities: the best way to control people is constant surveillance. That’s impossible. The close second best is having people never be able to be certain that they’re not under surveillance. You will discipline yourself to fit your imagined idea of what the authority wants. One way to do that is an authoritarian state with informants. Another is just to have recording devices—not just video, but metadata—integrated into the fabric of social life.Jared: There are these new Meta glasses with a red light that’s supposed to show when they’re recording. I saw just this week that for sixty dollars a company will disable the red light but keep the recording on. So you could always be recorded and have no way of knowing.I bought one of those AI friend pendants as an experiment, to write about why they’re bad. I couldn’t last a day with it. I didn’t realize it always listens. I went to the farmer’s market with my son—we go every weekend, he likes to get a popsicle from one of the stands—and I got this message on my phone: “Oh, popsicle time?” I smashed it with a hammer when I got home. I had invited this presence into my life, and it was observing this intimate moment with my son. I felt almost soiled by the experience.Lowry: We’ve been talking about being objects of surveillance, but we have just as much to lose when we become the surveillers. Overnight, without realizing it, we all became private detectives.Jared: We even say stalking as if it’s a joke.Lowry: In five or ten years it’s gone from one of the creepiest things you can do to a completely normal activity. Here’s an example from having little kids: baby monitors. At first we had the old-style audio monitor. If she woke up crying, we’d go in. Fine. Then we got a video monitor, and I started checking it in idle moments, the way we check our phones. My wife’s cousin had the next step up—an anklet that monitors vitals—and that one you check constantly, and when it falls off, you think maybe your baby’s dying. Each step that gives me more information about the child, the more information I think I need, and the more anxious I am. One thing we get from privacy, from limits to knowing more, is that those limits are part of the way we produce trust.Jared: My wife and I don’t share our locations with each other, and I’ve met people who are horrified by this—they think we have something to hide. By enabling the possibility of dishonesty, it gives us an opportunity to be honest with each other. If we were always disclosing our location, there’s no dishonesty—but there’s no honesty either, because there’s no chance to voluntarily reveal.Lowry: And therefore no trust. Trust isn’t a thing we have or don’t have. It’s something we do. As a kid, you have the experience of being trusted by being able to close your door. That seems very important for the development of a self who thinks of herself as worthy of trust—and therefore as worthy of leading her life in her own way. In the most forthcoming relationship imaginable—cohabitating spouses, co-parents—there are lots of privacies. The bathroom door, what she’s thinking in a pensive moment, what she’s texting. Imagine seeing those things as secret or hidden instead of private. Trust turns to suspicion, and what had been a sustaining thing falls apart.Jared: My wife and I never sat down and made these rules, but if I saw a letter from someone I didn’t recognize in the mail, I wouldn’t open it. I might ask about it later, and she’d tell me basically everything in it. And yet I would never ask, can I read it? I see that as a way of showing respect for her. In a long-term relationship the boundaries between the two persons get blurrier—you start doing life together. But you don’t want to obliterate the distinction and act like I have the right to know everything, because that reduces her as a person. I want to be in a long-term marriage with a fully realized human being, and her privacy is part of her full realization of her life.Lowry: Say the letter turns out to be totally innocuous, and you’d insisted: show it to me. If I were her, I would feel disrespected, but also invaded. Because you didn’t respect the boundary—that there was a part of my life beyond what you can get at.Jared: The problem isn’t that it was revealed. It’s that it was hers to reveal. To be human is in part to live together and strive for some kind of unity, but we’re also individuals. Privacy sits at one of those core tensions between social reality and individual reality. And I don’t think all tensions have to be resolved. Sometimes living with them is part of what it means to be human.Lowry: Tension can be good. Tension is what makes narrative exciting, what makes music move us. We shouldn’t want to get rid of all friction in human life, or we’d end up with a dull, flat, inhuman world. And the people outside the home get something from privacy too. There’s a door here—I don’t know what’s behind it. I’m surrounded by privacies all day, every day. It’s a human realm of the beyond in my life. That’s a public good that privacy radiates: a sense of depth, of possibility, a sense that the human world will always exceed what is known and quantifiable about it.Jared: You carried a backpack when you got in my car, and I didn’t even think to ask what’s in it. There could be a weapon in there. There could be a present. There could just be your notes.Lowry: Great example. Our default about limits to our knowledge is not a set feature of human biology—it’s a cultural product. Our default in the backpack case is privacy. It doesn’t call attention to itself. But it’s not hard to imagine a society in which we treat concealment as hiding: your eyes go to my backpack, and suddenly your mind is thinking, what’s in there? That’s a very different way of going through the world.Jared: It’s a much more paranoid world. It’s a small act of trust, and we get to do these little acts of trust.Lowry: And these small acts are productive. I have the experience of being trusted—it habituates me to a sense that I’m trustworthy, I belong in this society. Privacy—understood as privacy, not hiding—is a linchpin of that trust.Jared: Explain the title of your book: The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life. What is this right to oblivion?Lowry: I wanted a word for the kind of unknowing that privacy produces. Compare secrecy: the thing behind secrecy is secrets, and a secret is a piece of information. It can be shared—I come to know the information you were keeping. That, not coincidentally, is how we think of privacy in the age of privacy settings. By oblivion I mean a kind of unknowing that is fundamentally opposed to the existence of information—a limit that describes what is knowable, not just what’s known. A secret has to be information to exist. Oblivion cannot be.And privacy isn’t the only thing that produces this kind of unknowing. The two well-known kinds have both been described historically in terms of oblivion: death and forgetting. Something that’s actually forgotten is beyond your power to recall. The oblivion of death is a barrier beyond which knowledge and perception can’t pass. Because there’s a barrier, we know that there’s a beyond—but we can’t say anything about that realm.The corresponding kind of unknowing is obliviousness. We use it pejoratively, but think of the backpack—you’re oblivious to what’s in there. We don’t want people staring at our drapes, wondering what’s going on inside. We want them to walk by in blithe ignorance. That’s what we want from privacy: for people to be oblivious to our lives.One last thing. Oblivion comes from the Latin for forgetting—ob, toward or against, and livio, which the philologists aren’t completely sure about, but the general consensus is it means something smooth. Against or toward a smoothness. I like that because oblivion is an absence of knowledge, a kind of void—but a void we can integrate into our daily lives in myriad unnoticeable ways. And by doing so, we add depth and a sense of potentiality to the human person, and to the social, material world that we build.Jared: I was thinking about my own children as they get older. The phrase I wanted to use was, they’re going to start hiding things from me. But before they hide things because they’re ashamed, there are just going to be times where they start doing things in private. My impulse as a parent is to not let them do that. And I’m now thinking about what it would be like to rob my kids of their privacy. My son’s two and a half, and already he wants to do things for himself—and it’s a very small step from wanting to do things for yourself to wanting to do things in private.Lowry: I feel the same anxiety. And that anxiety isn’t a steady-state constant of human psychology—ironically, it’s directly correlated with how empowered we are to know more about them. These magical little rectangles are like cursed gifts from a fairy tale. They give us unbelievable powers, and yet they end up limiting us. In the same way that it would be damaging to a child to never have any sense of privacy—infantilizing — it’s infantilizing of adults to be surveilled that way. It’s a moral insult to treat an adult as if they were a child.Jared: That’s a great place for us to end. But before we go, we always ask for a book recommendation—something nobody’s reading, but you think everybody should.Lowry: Other than mine, obviously: Parallel Lives by Phyllis Rose. This is the most dark-horse book I’ve ever read. The cover is schmaltzy, and it says it’s the story of five Victorian marriages—Carlyle, Mill, Dickens. And her analysis of how these couples led parallel lives, entwined, but living different versions of the same marriage, is one of the most beautifully written, insightful, and profound books on what it means to be a human being with others that I’ve ever read. I think it’s a masterpiece, and it deserves to be much more widely read.Jared: Well, that sounds great. Lowry Pressly, thanks for joining us.Lowry: Thank you so much for having me, Jared. It’s been fun. Get full access to The Honest Broker at www.honest-broker.com/subscribe

What Do You Have to Hide?

The Great Books Are for Everyone

The New Counterculture

How to Be a Serious Reader

Welcome back to The Honest Broker interview series—also available on our new YouTube channel. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms.Today, I’m pleased to share my conversation with Naomi Kanakia. Please support The Honest Broker by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).Naomi is a writer. She’s published four novels, and her next book, What’s So Great About the Great Books?, will be released in May by Princeton University Press. She also writes the wonderful Woman of Letters newsletter here on Substack, and she is working on a short story collection to be published by Random House. I had the pleasure of reading What’s So Great About the Great Books? last year, and here’s what I wrote for the blurb:If you've ever wanted to read the Great Books, or ever wondered why you should, this is the book for you. Personal, humorous, and intimate, What’s So Great About the Great Books? gives us a great gift: a grounded guide to the classics, and a new standard for introducing these books to modern readers.In our conversation, we covered a range of topics, including why she wanted to write about the Great Books, why she decided to read them in the first place, and her struggles (and occasional triumphs) in the publishing industry. Below are some highlights from our dialogue. For the full conversation, check out the video at the top of the page.Highlights from the Naomi Kanakia InterviewJared: Naomi Kanakia, thank you for joining me. Naomi: Thanks for having me. Jared: You’re writing a book about the classics, which will be published by Princeton University Press. Tell me a little bit about what made you want to dedicate a year or two of your life to writing a book about the classics?Naomi: When I first started wanting to seriously be a writer, I decided that I should read all these great books that people always talk about. I bought a book called The New Lifetime Reading Program, I typed out the list of books recommended by this volume, and I have now spent 15 years reading through many of these books.Then, four or five years ago, I started writing some essays online, and an editor from Princeton reached out to me and asked if I wanted to do a book. At the time, I was between agents and my career prospects seemed pretty dire, and I wanted to work.I really love books about reading classics. I really like the angry polemical books, like Alan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, but I do feel that there’s a lot of angry polemic in this space. I felt there was room for more measured opinions, because I do think there are serious critiques to be made of the concept of reading old books. I wanted to write a book that took those concerns seriously and also had a more conversational tone. Jared: What are some of those critiques that you have in mind that you want to respond to?Naomi: A lot of books about reading classics are defenses of the humanities, or the idea that you should think deeply and love nuance. And it’s like, nobody’s against those things. The real question is: why do you have to read Milton instead of reading a modern author? Are we really saying that these old books are the best books and no modern books are good? Really, it’s a defense of a specific canon of books, and I believe that list is good and that people should read those books. Generally, it’s easier to gravitate towards the contemporary, and you have to try a little bit harder to look at these older books. But there are two major concerns. One is that older books are more difficult and more inaccessible. The other major concern is that if you’re reading older books, there will be less diversity. Jared: And despite those criticisms, you’re making an argument that it’s worth reading these old books. Naomi: Yes.Jared: I assume for part of that project, you had to go back and reread a lot of books. Was that part of the research, or was it just drawing on what you’ve been doing for the last fifteen years?Naomi: This was mostly an excuse to mentally return to a lot of my touchstones. These older books have a sense of integrity. This project was just an opportunity for me to go back to some of my favorite books and look at the ways that’s true. And I haven’t read every Great Book, but I believe in the wisdom that created this list. Jared: One of the striking things about reading books that make it onto the canon or the list of classic books is that oftentimes they’re really weird. Moby-Dick is famous for being dry and boring if you try to read it in high school, but I don’t see how anyone gets that impression, though, because Moby-Dick is just a really odd book. Naomi: Almost always when I open these books, I see how strange they are. At one point, I went back and was like, ‘How did contemporaries view Moby-Dick?’ Because Melville had written travel narratives, a lot of readers came to Moby-Dick to learn about whales and the whaling industry. They wondered why it was wedded to this weird, Shakespearean plot.Jared: Did any books on your list disappoint you?Naomi: Moby-Dick, the first time I read it. I found myself bored. I reread it earlier this year and had a lot more appreciation for it. I would say Don Quixote is tough.Jared: Something I find so interesting about your writing is that you write about the classics, but you’re very keyed into the weird parts of online writing: things like Kindle Direct romances or even fanfic. There’s a type of person who styles themselves as readers of the classics, and another type of person who styles themselves as lovers of fanfic. You seem to be comfortable in both worlds. Or are you always a little uncomfortable?Naomi: As a kid, I only read science fiction and fantasy books, and I wanted to be a writer of science fiction and fantasy. Science fiction and fantasy is a world in itself, and it has its own critical apparatus. Reading the classics was a way to see what else is out there. And it is odd, because the classics exist because they are, you know, ‘above’ popular culture. You have to say that reading Moby-Dick is a better use of your time than reading a self-published orc romance.Jared: Do you think there are going to be orc romances on the list of classics?Naomi: That sort of writing reminds me of the early days of science fiction. You had these sci-fi fanzines by people who just felt compelled to explain why this stuff was so good and better than contemporary published writing. Those zines preserved the early classics of the genre because pulp magazines were disposable. Without that effort, we wouldn’t have science fiction today.Jared: You’re weird, right? I mean this as a compliment. You write self-published fiction, and it gets critical attention in The New Yorker. Did that happen with your previous books?Naomi: No. I’m the author of three young adult novels and a novel for adults. None of these were discussed in The New Yorker. But last October, I published a novella on Substack, and Peter C. Baker, who writes for The New Yorker, really liked it, and he pitched a story. Jared: You have a very distinctive style. Tell me about that. Naomi: I call it the ‘tale,’ A few years ago, I got really into Icelandic sagas. I was really struck by how they’re recognizably novel-like, but they don’t have any of the conventions of fiction. They don’t have a lot of description. They don’t have a close point of view. Reading those, along with ancient Greek fiction, inspired me. The style is very stripped down, has a strong point of view, goes in and out of different heads. It has very little description of setting, scenery. I have very strong opinions about the stories, too, so I’ll interject my opinions about what’s going on. And so I started self-publishing those on Substack.Jared: You write these tales on Substack now. They’re really stripped down. You tell a lot of story with very few words. And one of the reasons you’re able to do that is because you’re not giving into these long descriptions, these sensory details. And you’re definitely okay with telling rather than showing. But that’s not how you used to write. I was looking at some of your older books, especially The Default World. The opening scene is the main character going to a coffee shop. We’re deep in her head. She is trying to suss something out about another character, but you’re seeing visual descriptions of them. You give us some backstory, but it’s all very, really strictly in her point of view as well. Did you feel comfortable writing that style, or do you feel like you were trying to do something because it was the expectation?Naomi: When you start off writing fiction, you are really imitating the models that you know and trying to produce things that look like recognizable stories. When I started writing The Default World—which was my serious, important novel to be taken seriously—I wrote it in a more distant, omniscient perspective. But as I tried to interest agents, they felt too distanced from the narrative. So I rewrote it to be more immediate and embodied. I didn’t like it, and it did not feel natural.Over the last 200 years, we’ve built up a set of conventions that are designed to put you right in the action and make you feel like you’re living out the dream of the story. I do feel like we might have hit the end of that style. I definitely think it is a tradition that has produced a lot of good work, but it doesn’t feel like the life is there anymore.Writing these tales was a way for me to feel like I was getting back to why I had started wanting to write, which is just to tell a story.Jared: Okay, this is an interesting tension then, because you are not opposed to writing to market. You’ve tried to write to market, but you did better when you stopped writing to market. People actually wanted to read it. I think that’s a good lesson for people. When I read The Default World,  I thought that you felt very self-conscious. You were less confident than the Naomi Kanakia I’ve read online. Naomi: When I started writing these tales, it was like a bow shot from an arrow. It hit the target. I really prioritize preserving that feeling of inspiration.Jared: Tell me about anyone else you find exciting on Substack.Naomi: Alexander Sorondo. He’s great.Jared: I sent him a text last night and just said, ‘Every time I bring a writer into town from Substack, they bring you up.’Naomi: He writes two sorts of things. He writes these long, deeply reported, maximalist literary criticism pieces on people like William Volmann. And then he writes these short, punchy lyric essays that are just kind of unlike what anybody else is writing. I love him. I love Henry Begler, who is another literary critic on Substack. I’ve actually learned a lot from Henry. I copy Henry. I steal from what he does.Jared: We always end these episodes by asking for book recommendations. Do you have something for us?Naomi: I really think people should read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It’s hard to overstate. It’s about this guy, Tom, who is in slavery in Kentucky in a border state. He’s treated relatively well by his family and has his own house and has a wife and a family. But then they fall on hard times, and so they have to sell him off to a creditor. And then he goes through deepening circles of hell as he is sold further and further south to different owners. It’s just like an incredibly powerful book. This was written at a time when slavery was legal, and there were many people who defended slavery and thought that it was a moral system in various ways. And it was written to show that there is no goodness under slavery.Jared: Naomi Kanakia, thank you for joining us.Naomi: Thank you.  Get full access to The Honest Broker at www.honest-broker.com/subscribe

Why Read the Classic Books?

Welcome back to The Honest Broker interview series —also available on our new YouTube channel. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms.Today, I’m pleased to share my conversation with C. Thi Nguyen.Please support The Honest Broker by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).Nguyen is a former food writer who became a philosopher. He’s now an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah, where he also teaches in the Division of Games. His first book, Games: Agency as Art, won the 2021 Book Prize from the American Philosophical Association. In January, Nguyen released The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. It’s an exploration of the philosophy of games and a critical examination of the detrimental effects of gamification and institutional metrics. (I wrote a review of The Score on my own Substack.) Jennifer Szalai described The Score in a review at The New York Times: “This may be the only book in existence that discusses the game of Twister, the ethics of Aristotle and the mechanics of bureaucracies.” Below are highlights from my interview. For the rest of our conversation, check out the video at the top of the page.Highlights from the C. Thi Nguyen InterviewJared: Thi, thank you for joining me.Thi: I’m happy to be here.Jared: I want to start off with a big broad question: why are games fun?Thi: There are so many answers to that. I’ve given much more complicated answers, but maybe the dumbest answer is one of the deepest. Games are actually designed to be fun. Not all games, but a lot of the games we find fun are not accidents. It’s an ultra-careful fine-tuning process. Designing for fun is so delicate. If you just tweak a few little bits in the incentive structure or tweak a few little rules, the fun will fall out of things. People think fun is mysterious — it’s not for game designers. There are micro-issues of exactly how you pace the timing and exactly how you pace the rules that seem to emerge. A lot of people are most impressed by the game designs that are elaborate and complicated, but what a lot of game designers are most impressed by is a five-rule party game that’s fun, because that’s the hardest thing to build.I think it’s important to acknowledge that these things are designed objects that have been subject to brutal design cycles.Jared: If I’m playing games, I have two very different preferences. One of them is that I really like cozy games, like Stardew Valley. But then my other love is roguelikes, which are so frustrating. I played Slay the Spire last night, and I never made it to the last level. It was an intentionally frustrating experience, and I went to bed happy. I think that’s weird. The challenge is why you want to keep playing, and it makes it more satisfying. Thi: Roguelikes are probably the center of my video game universe. But when you asked about fun, I immediately thought about laughter, the social part of fun. In game design circles, ‘fun’ is used a little more technically, where they are talking about ‘fun games.’ I have the same experience as you that most of what I love is intensely, gruelingly difficult and mostly involves failure and pushing your way intensely to get tiny moments of success. I have a theory about why that is deeply enjoyable for us. In games, unlike ordinary life, you can seek exactly the balance of difficulty, frustration, skill, and success that suits you. That’s unlike the world, which says ‘Now you must work on this thing at this difficulty.’ The choice structure is that you get to choose whether you’re playing Stardew Valley or Slay the Spire, and that ability to adapt the challenge environment to you makes it much more possible to find the deliciousness wherever it may lie for you. Jared: This is probably related to our mutual love of rock climbing. Thi: Rock climbing taught me a lot. Climbing is what taught me to pay attention to my body and the way my body moves, and part of it was exactly the difficulty scale. It gave me feedback. Godfrey Devereaux, who is one of my favorite yoga writers, has this amazing passage where he says that one of the reasons we do yoga is that a lot of us want meditation, but we fail at seated meditation. In seated meditation, when your mind wanders, you don’t notice because your mind has wandered. But when you’re in a hard yoga pose, if your mind wanders, then you wobble. That feedback tells you to go back.I think climbing is a particularly neat example of this because in a lot of games, the choice of difficulty is kind of hidden in the background. But rock climbing really surfaces the subtle degree of choice. Jared: I’ve only sustained one major injury from climbing. I cracked my fibular head on a warm-up climb. It was my second climb of the day. And what I thought was, ‘I can skip that hold because this is an easy climb.’ I was craving a certain kind of experience, and I rushed to get that experience. I rushed to the difficulty I was getting ready for. There’s also something potentially misleading about difficulty scales. Thi: You’re opening up two completely different universes to talk about right now. One is about the pleasure of games, and the other is about data compression of seemingly objective scales.Jared: Let’s stick with the pleasure of games. I’m trying not to lead with dystopia. Thi: You’re making me realize something I hadn’t quite thought about. I had an original model with games where games set an exact mental state and attitude that you entered into as you entered the game. But as I was writing The Score, I ended up thinking a lot more about variable games like rock climbing and fly-fishing. We plunge ourselves into a goal, but we often step back and are able to modulate what that goal is to chase a particular kind of experience. You’re making me realize that there’s careful modulation of the game experience even in the process of warming up.Jared: You get to be in control of your experience in a really nice way, which is related to what you said earlier, which is that life often does not give us that sense of control. Games give us a sense of power over our circumstances.Thi: When I started working on games, I did not realize that they were as interesting as I have now found them to be. When I started working on it, I was just going to write one little paper because I was annoyed. I’d read a couple books on the philosophy of video games, and they were all using cinema theory, and I was like, ‘This is dumb.’  I think the big unlock was reading Reiner Knizia saying that points give you the motivational system. I was sitting around with friends, and I said, ‘The most important thing about games isn’t that they’re fiction. They’re like art governments. They’re governments for fun.’ You play around with rules and incentives and shape people’s actions—not to rule them, but to create a beautiful experience. Jared: Let’s talk about The Score. One way of explaining your book is that you have a theory of games, and you give that to us early on in the book, and then you have a theory of something like pernicious gamification in which metrics are imposed, and we start playing these games in the rest of our lives. The big question you open up at the end of the first chapter is: ‘Is this the game I want to be playing?’ Tell me a bit about what led you to go from thinking about games, which are a source of joy, to thinking about this. Thi: I was writing my first book, which is a love ode to games. Toward the end of writing it, people were like, ‘Oh, you love games, so you must love gamification.’ I hate gamification! My gut sense was that if you actually understood what was good about games, then you’ll see forced and pervasive gamification as kind of horrible. The term I’m using for this process is value capture. This is when your values are rich and subtle, and then you are presented with a simplification of your values in an institutional setting,  and these are typically quantified. The simplification takes over your reasoning and seizes your attention. It starts to replace your values. Jared: Here are some examples: language apps, fitness trackers, law school rankings. In my own world of YouTube, we have views, likes, comments, revenue, and more. These become markers of good videos rather than thinking about educational quality, entertainment value, or just making something you’re proud of. One thing you note is that when our values are rich and subtle, they’re usually qualitative. They can even be a bit ambiguous. We’re both analytic philosophers, and we’re always told to take the ambiguous and make it precise. But part of your book might be that ambiguity is where the freedom is. Ambiguity gives you a sense of ownership and agency. That clarity might also be fake clarity. Thi: Yes! When I first started doing this, I used the term ‘gamification.’ But I’ve come to think that what actually matters is the long progress of the last thousand years of an emphasis on institutional accountability at scale. The thing I’ve been chasing is an attempt to explain why a lot of our values might be better captured by ambiguous, fuzzy, rough language, or by poetic, metaphorical language.There are two dimensions, and I think they’re not quite the same. One of them is that when things are ambiguous, we have more degrees of freedom. The other is that there might be a real value there, but that drawing a clear, definable line is going to mess the essential fuzziness of the real thing. Theodore Porter has this book, Trust in Numbers, where he’s trying to explain why bureaucrats and administrators compulsively reach for quantitative justifications. He says that qualitative communication is rich, open-ended, and context-sensitive, but it travels badly between contexts. Quantitative information is design to travel between contexts and make aggregation possible. What Porter made me realize is that the thing that makes metrics socially powerful is precisely that they have had context stripped out of them. It’s a design feature and a design bug in one. Jared: One thing about quantified systems that I find so striking is that once you enter into this realm of legibility and numbers, it becomes nearly impossible not to engage in rankings. Thi: One of the big lessons for me from philosophy of technology is that one of the best ways to think about the impact of a technological system—and I think metrics are a technological system —is to think about what they make easy and what they make hard. Consider maps. Dennis Woods in The Power of Maps has all these great questions. Why don’t maps show sound quality? Why don’t they show where the pleasant nature is? It’s because the map-maker is often interested in things like property lines and commuting by car. Not every game has a scoring system. You can have a competition without a scoring system. You can go to the skate park and skate with your friends. Even if you have a similar goal, like Be the coolest, you can judge that in different ways. When you transition to official contexts like ESPNX, which require an official verdict, then you get this movement towards more easily countable targets, like flips and the height of jumps. The same thing happened in yo-yoing. The rise of the competition scene happened during the YouTube era, so there are records. The space of what counted as good yo-yoing was once much wider. There were a lot of tricks that were just done for beauty, or grace, or flow. Now, the scene is locked in on speed and difficulty. It sucks a lot of the joy out of those activities. Jared: We could talk for hours, but we need to end. Do you have a book recommendation for our audience?Thi: I want to recommend a book that I think is incredibly important for right now. It’s a technical book. It’s by a law professor, Julia Cohen, called Between Truth and Power. It’s an attempt to understand precisely the changes in property law that make our current world of data-ownership possible. The current world of data that we’re in right now didn’t have to be. It is a particular construct of a particular way of envisioning data as ownable that was created by very specific laws that are entirely changeable. Jared: C. Thi Nguyen, thank you for me. Thi: Thank you so much, man.  Get full access to The Honest Broker at www.honest-broker.com/subscribe

The Philosopher of Games

Welcome back to The Honest Broker interview series —also available on our new YouTube channel. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms.Today, I’m sharing my conversation with Jennifer Frey. Please support The Honest Broker by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).Jennifer is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tulsa. She is also a faculty fellow at the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America. She earned her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh in 2012.She’s also a fierce proponent of liberal education. She brought that passion with her to the University of Tulsa, where she built a new honors college and served as the inaugural dean — until, after just two years, the administration cut its funding by 92%. When that happened, Jennifer responded in the New York Times, offering an ardent defense of the value of liberal education. In that piece, she wrote:When students realize their own humanity is at stake in their education, they are deeply invested in it. The problem with liberal education in today’s academy does not lie with our students. The real threat to liberal learning is from an administrative class that is content to offer students far less than their own humanity calls for—and deserves.I knew I wanted to talk to Jennifer about these issues. She joined me here in Austin to discuss the story of Tulsa’s honors college, the many problems facing higher education in the United States, and the value of helping students craft intellectual friendships. Below are highlights from the interview. For the rest of our conversation, check out the video at the top of the page.Jennifer’s family recently experienced a serious medical event, and her husband Chris had to be hospitalized. There is a donation page for her family as Chris recovers. Highlights from the Jennifer Frey InterviewJared: Jennifer Frey, thank you for joining me.Jennifer: Thanks for having me.Jared: Why don’t we start by just telling everybody the story of what happened at the University of Tulsa?Jennifer: I’m a philosopher, and prior to moving to Tulsa, I was at the University of South Carolina. In 2020, we were all on Twitter a lot, and I post a lot about higher ed. One day I posted about the University of Tulsa and how terrible it was because they had eliminated their philosophy department, which is happening at a lot of places, and there was an acceleration during COVID. You actually don’t need to have a financial calamity to just want to murder philosophy. You simply need to not value it.I checked my replies, and I got a reply from the president of the University of Tulsa that said, ‘Hey, Jen, we’re not that bad. You should come visit us.’ He followed up and said, ‘I probably agree with a lot of your criticisms. I’d love for you to come out.’ In November of 2021, I went to the University of Tulsa, and I gave a talk in which I criticized the university, but I also talked about why philosophy should always be at the center of a university. That was the first time in my life I got a standing ovation for a talk.It turns out the president had an ulterior motive. He wanted to start an honors college, which he said would be like a mini St. John’s College.  Great books, liberal education. “We grew enrollment by 500%, and we were bringing 26% to 27% of freshman into honors….We were bringing in money, grants, and donors. Then it all ended.” Jared: For many people, building something like that is a dream.Jennifer: Yes. I was like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting. You should do that.’ Then he asked me to come lead it. I said no, but he was very persistent. Eventually, we agreed that I would help him build a college on paper. We worked together for about a year, and at the end of the year, I kind of fancied what I had come up with. Then he said, ‘I still need someone to run this college.’ I interviewed, and I was hired and decided to move the whole family halfway across the country to Oklahoma to start this new college.  The transition to administration, and away from an intellectual life to a very practical life, was very difficult, but it was incredibly rewarding. But to make a long story short, it was really successful. We grew enrollment by 500%, and we were bringing 26% to 27% of freshman into honors. Jared: Were these students who probably wouldn’t have applied to the university if it weren’t for the honors college?Jennifer: I think some of them, yes. They had to do a separate application for honors, and we’re very clear that it is a lot of effort. I was always impressed by how many young people wanted to do this, because it’s reading thousands of pages of difficult books every semester for two years. We built a residential college, and they were living together in a community, with all kinds of activities. We were bringing in money, grants, and donors. Then it all ended just about as quickly as you might imagine. Jared: Before we go into exactly how it ended, let’s talk a little bit about what the curriculum was like. Jennifer: We built it to be collaborative with the faculty who are teaching it. The most controversial thing was that it was a set curriculum. Everyone is going to teach the same syllabus. And that was for the simple reason that I wanted to build community. It was four semesters of great books from Homer to Hannah Arendt. The first semester of freshman year, it was Three Ancient Cities: Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem. You’re reading texts that would be considered sacred. You’re reading epic poems. You’re reading philosophy. You’re reading tragedy. You’re reading history. Then the second semester is the Long Middle Ages, emphasis on long. We read Augustine’s Confessions, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, the Divine Comedy — and we read all of it, because if you just read Inferno  you’re not going to understand what he was up to. We also read St. Benedict’s Rule, because medieval monasticism is so important. Jared: If they’re reading Benedict’s Rule, they’re also going to get something like lectio divina. They’re going to get some kind of an idea of close reading that’s not deconstructive reading. Jennifer: In your first year, you’ve gone from Homer to Calvin. That’s a huge range of time. And I want to stress that these are seminars. There are no lectures or secondary sources.In your sophomore year, it’s the Birth of Modernity. That’s basically Machiavelli to Mary Shelley. You get Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Marx. We read Don Quixote, which is a lot, but also very fun.Jared: This is probably where students are likely recognizing names more. Maybe they recognize some names early on in the Greek stuff. Jennifer: But I’m not expecting incoming freshman to be conversant yet. Then in the last class, it is just the 19th and 20th century. That starts with de Tocqueville. Then we get to Hannah Arendt, and then every instructor gets a free text so they can end wherever they want. Jared: What semester do you think the students enjoyed the most?Jennifer: I didn’t run a survey, but I would put a lot of money on Three Ancient Cities being the most popular class.Jared: So the students would do this for two years and then finish their studies in the broader University of Tulsa.Jennifer: Yes. Our idea was that what we really needed to fix in higher education is general education. When you go to university, you have general education requirements. And the way that it functions in most universities is like a big cafeteria or buffet. Somebody hands you 10 categories, and they’re like ‘You need a green vegetable, you need three proteins, you need dairy.’ And students kind of look and see what’s left over or what looks good. That’s your general education. It’s incoherent. It’s mostly a matter of luck. It used to be obvious to everyone that general education should be liberal, right? It’s not yoked to expertise or any sort of output. It’s a kind of formation, and it was thought that you needed a certain kind of liberal formation. Small ‘l’ liberal, not political or partisan. Jared: I’m ashamed of this fact, but I managed to get a PhD in philosophy without reading The Republic. Jennifer: It wasn’t your fault. Jared: I took the history classes that were available. I checked the boxes. Then I went to grad school, and they assume that you’ve read Kant, The Republic, things like that.Jennifer: Where did you go?Jared: The University of Connecticut. Jennifer: Did they even hope you’d read it? Did they care? Honest question. Jared: One or two people there probably cared. Jennifer: Were they Pitt people?Jared: They were. Do you know Lionel Shapiro?Jennifer: Of course.Jared: Lionel cared. Jennifer: What a good man.  He’s from the old days of Pitt where it was like ‘You’re going to know your stuff.’Jared: His history of philosophy seminars were notorious for the sheer intensity you had to bring to them.Jennifer: Because he had experienced it!Jared: My speculation is that new graduate students are coming in and have already started specializing. They’re pre-specialized. I started specializing as soon as I could. Jennifer: I could go on a really long, angry tirade about how much I’m opposed to that. But back to the general point about higher education. Honors colleges are uniquely American. They function as a way for a very bright student to do their general education with honors classes. I sort of saw this as an opportunity to provide a general education that was truly liberal. My hope was that we could prove this is popular, that students want it, and that it works.You just want to really kind of develop what Aristotle would call intellectual virtues. And you want to do it for the sake of human excellence, human flourishing.Jared: So what happened?Jennifer: I got fired. The president who courted me left, and then the provost did too. A new provost comes in, and the first thing she did was get rid of honors. They cut the budget by, I think, 92%. Almost everyone I hired was gone. We were pretty disruptive of the status quo, and I think maybe that wasn’t appreciated by everyone. Jared: There’s this story that we tell about higher education: student’s don’t want to read, students aren’t interested, the kinds of things you’re offering doesn’t speak to students’ experiences, interests, or needs. I don’t think that’s a narrative you buy. Jennifer: No, it makes me so angry. It feels patronizing to students. It’s also just false, and it’s a great way to excuse oneself from doing your job. And I think that everyone needs to ask themselves to what extent is student disengagement a reflection of problems in class or the university that need to be addressed? Maybe we can’t teach in the same way we’ve been teaching. I don’t think that the traditional lecture is the best mode of doing philosophy. Philosophy is dialectic. Jared: When I was still in the classroom, even if I had a class of only 30 for an introductory class, my goal was to see how quickly I could get them talking to each other. As soon as they do that, and they see that there is a real disagreement, that what one person thinks is obvious another thinks is absurd…suddenly, they’re doing philosophy.Jennifer: I learned pretty early on that if you start out lecturing at students, it’s disruptive to expect them to talk. So, I just decided to flip that. I would start every class by asking questions. That totally reorients them.I think that one thing that was so important about the honors seminar is that it was a conversation. It was conversation sustained over an hour and some change. There’s a lot of formation going on in conversation. Wisdom requires the cultivation of certain virtues, and the best context in which to pursue both of those things is intellectual friendship. The students were friends, and they were friends who did not agree.Jared: What is honors at Tulsa like now?Jennifer: You’d have to ask the students. I’m on sabbatical, and I’m not teaching honors. Jared: Were there any texts that you had in your curriculum that students hated?Jennifer: What a great question. There were some texts that didn’t land as well as others. Some of the history texts were like that. A lot people did not like the Federalist Papers. Some people really didn’t like Sappho. Everybody loves Homer.Jared: With many of these texts, they are so much weirder than you expect them to be.Jennifer: The students are always surprised by how how naughty medieval literature is. They were like, ‘Oh, wow, there’s a lot of adultery in this.’Jared: I want to ask you for a book recommendation for our audience. We’re looking for books that you think everybody should read. Do you have something for us?Jennifer: People should read a book by Zena Hitz called Lost in Thought. It’s very much related to the things that we’ve been talking about. Zena is a tutor at St. John’s, a philosopher, and a friend of the perennial philosophy. It’s a beautiful book. It’s part memoir, part defense of the liberality of liberal learning. She really leans into the idea that seeking knowledge for its own sake is deeply, deeply connected to human flourishing. And she does it by showing it. Jared: Jennifer Frey, thank you for joining us. Jennifer: Thank you. Get full access to The Honest Broker at www.honest-broker.com/subscribe

This University Built an Honors College — and Then Destroyed It

Welcome to the latest installment of our interview series here at The Honest Broker—also available on our new YouTube channel. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms.Today, I’m excited to share my conversation with Ross Barkan.Please support The Honest Broker by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).Ross is a busy man. He is not only the writer behind Political Currents by Ross Barkan — he’s also a contributor to venues like New York Magazine, the author of the novels Glass Century and Colossus, and editor-in-chief of  The Metropolitan Review. So naturally, I wanted to talk to Ross about writing and publishing. Once we started talking, we couldn’t stop. This interview is cut down from nearly three hours of continuous conversation. We discussed the state of publishing, the difficulty of launching a new culture review, America’s political and literary history, AI art, and the ways that platforms like Substack are changing how we write and what we can get away with. Below are highlights from the interview. For the rest of our conversation, check out the video at the top of the page.Highlights from the Ross Barkan InterviewJared: I was prepping for this interview, and I was talking to a mutual friend of ours, Alexander Sorondo. He asked if I was going to talk to you about politics or about literature and writing. I had to confess to him that I didn’t know you wrote about politics. I knew you exclusively from novels and things like The Metropolitan Review. Ross: I like politics, but my love lies with literature and culture, and I think that comes across on Substack. That’s why Substack’s been so great, because the literary world is very hard to penetrate. Media is hard, but there is a very straightforward way that I could tell someone to break in. Come up with an idea, look at what the publication publishes, find the editor’s email, pitch them. They might not respond, but you can always pitch again, and at some point they might respond. The media world still moves at a pretty quick pace, and even though it is very desiccated due to all these economic forces, there are still outlets out there. The literary world is still this very strange organism, and it really took Substack for me to have any kind of literary career or stature of any kind. Substack’s not perfect. I don’t want to turn into a Substack fanboy, but it is different. It has opened up so many pathways. You mentioned Alexander Sorondo. We published his 15,000-word profile of William Vollmann in The Metropolitan Review. This is a piece that he could not get published anywhere. And to me, that’s insane. Jared: I think I was the third reader of Alex’s novel, Cubafruit. He sent me a copy before it was released, and I read it, and I was like ‘This is great. I love it.’ He went through that whole slog. He had an agent who loved his novel. He was getting personalized rejections, and every rejection would be effusive with praise, and they would say “We don’t know where to place this.” He’s a writer who just doesn’t fit into an easy mold. There is no niche for him right now. He’s doing something interesting, and the current media environment doesn’t know where to place him, and so he had to just go find something on his own. Insofar as I’m ever a fan of a platform, it’s because it gives people an opportunity to do something cool.Ross: I was starting my career at the height of the 2010s digital upstarts. That was supposed to save writing and media, and it did not. And it’s fascinating to see with Substack that it has inculcated genuinely original writing. Sorondo, Naomi Kanakia, John Pistelli, Henry Begler, Sam Kriss. They write differently. That’s what’s so exciting. You don’t see that from a lot of mainstream outlets anymore. There’s less room for literary nonfiction. When you look at New Journalism, with people like Tom Wolfe, or Joan Didion, or Gay Talese — they had very particular styles, right? They didn’t all sound the same. What bothered me about the internet era was it felt like there was a real flatness to the prose. I have really enjoyed this era much more.Jared: It’s gone past that kind of voiceless, generic, Millennial snark. Ross: I called it Gawker speak. The snark voice. That was so dominant. Very irony-drenched, very casual, humorous but kind of bitter. When it started, there was something refreshing about it. But then that took over the internet. I felt like the capital ‘L’ literary was lost in that, and I also felt like other types of idiosyncratic writing could not break through in the same way. Jared:  So tell me a little bit about the thought that went behind founding The Metropolitan Review. What are you trying to accomplish with this? Because I do think it sits in a really interesting space. It’s long-form. Pieces are usually over 3,000 words, which on Substack is huge. You’re also going to have a print edition. Ross: Yes, we are planning for a print edition. It’s going to be very nice. We have a great team: Lou Bahet, Vanessa Ogle, Django Ellenhorn.  Lou wanted to do something longer-lasting, that could sit on your bookshelf. So, we’re taking our time to get it there, and we have a printer in place, and now it’s really just getting these logistics in order. I wanted to start a publication that’s going to review books, because it is harder and harder to get books reviewed. I also wanted a publication that lets the writer be the writer. We do edit The Metropolitan Review, but the edit will never erase someone’s voice. You will sound like yourself. We don’t have a single house style. Jared: I think that the choice you’re making to have a premium printing is the right one. I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy authors as well. They expect that their books won’t sell well unless they get big on TikTok. But you make your money by then later printing 1,500 copies of an ultra-premium edition. Ross: That’s amazing. It’s a great idea. Jared:  We’re not going to see a return to the old paperback era, where you could make a living just churning out science fiction paperbacks over the weekend. But you can cultivate a fan base that will pay for the real thing, and they don’t just want a hardback. They want a really luxurious item that they can put on their shelf.Ross: Exactly.Jared: When I was reading Glass Century, I noticed that the way you write it had an ambivalence about identity throughout. Very early on, there’s a fake wedding between Mona and Saul. There are these little conversations that let people know everyone’s ethnic backgrounds. Saul will tell you the difference between German Jews and Russian Jews. So, I thought this was an ‘identity-first’ book. But your main character, Mona…she doesn’t care. Was that intentional?Ross: I think I have always felt very ambivalent about it. I am a secular Jew. I had a bar mitzvah and did a little Hebrew school, but I never identified myself first as a Jew or even as a white person. I always felt that I am me and my interests. Some would say that’s a luxury and a privilege, and I accept that. Having grown up in New York City, I always understood identity was very complicated. I didn’t grow up with a great distinction between the German and the Russian Jew, but I knew my history. I understood that the German Jew and the Russian Jew are, in fact, quite distinct. I’m descended from the Russian Jews, the Jews who came from the pogroms of the 19th century. The fled here during the era of mass immigration, and that’s why I’m always going to be pro-immigrant. So, it’s a little similar to Saul in the book. The German Jew is very assimilated, was wealthier. They also tended to be almost Christian-passing. Jared: I think Saul uses the phrase ‘barely part of the tribe.’Ross: Yes, that’s how the German Jew is seen. Dianne Feinstein, the late senator from California, is a great example of this. She was a German Jew who grew up in San Francisco. She attended a Catholic school, and that was something that was not uncommon if you were part of this older community. Jared: I liked Glass Century because it was a book that took identity seriously, but it didn’t make it the only focus. Ross: I’ve found the woke/anti-woke binary very exhausting. I think we need to move back to universal values. There’s a very healthy way to talk about identity. You can’t talk about American history without the sins of slavery. Before we recorded this, I walked to the Texas capitol. It was very interesting to see a Confederate monument.  And it sits there, very distinctly, a block away from an Austin pride flag. We can’t dismiss the sins of the past, but we have to acknowledge progress. Jared: One of my favorite cultural institutions in the United States is the Library of America. I ask myself ‘Why doesn’t every country have a publisher that does this?’ And I love the fact that in the Library of America, you read the foundational documents of the United States. You read Black writers during Reconstruction. You  read New York City Jews in the 1970s. It’s remarkable. Ross: You see throughout American history that there’s this push-pull. It’s cycles. It’s battles. It is great terror and great failure, mixed with great hope and great success. And that is the story of America that should be told, because that is the story of America. Jared: Let me read something to you: ‘We are fattened, bloody flesh sacks doomed to obsolescence, pacified by programs that will do all the thinking and feeling for us. If we stop thinking, what is left? To submit? To putter along like amoebae?’ That’s you writing about the New Romanticism and AI. So why don’t you tell us how you really feel?Ross: New Romanticism is very interesting to me. Ted Gioia originated the idea, and it drew me in right away. I think it captures a general mood. A growing number of people are very disenchanted with technology as it stands today. They are looking to older forms, a return to a more interpersonal and in-person dynamic, a real turn away from techno-optimism. I believe that we are in a space where we understand technology’s ill effects. Why is it for tens of thousands of years, humanity could paint paintings, write novels, use imagination? Why do you need a machine to replace that? I get why you need a machine to lift a heavy object. I get why you need a machine to do complex mathematical calculations. I get why you need a machine to do medical exams. We need machines for many things. The proponents of AI don’t really say why you need a machine to make what is now very mediocre art. Jared: Do you have a book recommendation for our audience?Ross: Ken Kesey is very famous for writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which is a great book. No one knows his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, which is this wonderful epic of the Pacific Northwest. It was a formative novel in my youth, and I highly recommend it. Jared: Ross Barkan, thanks for joining me.Ross: Thank you for having me. This was wonderful.  Get full access to The Honest Broker at www.honest-broker.com/subscribe

Publishing Is Getting Smaller—and Maybe Better

The Honest Broker interview series continues with a very special guest, Nicholas Carr. He is the author of The Shallows, a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, and more recently of Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart. You can watch here or on our YouTube channel. You can also find The Honest Broker Podcast on your favorite podcasting platforms.Please support The Honest Broker by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).Our conversation covers Nicholas’s turn to ‘tech skepticism,’ the fact that books like The Shallows sell a lot of copies but don’t seem to slow the adoption of these technologies, the history of technologies of connection like radio, and much more.An edited transcript of highlights from our conversation can be found below. Highlights from the Nicholas Carr InterviewFor the full interview, check out the video at the top of the page.Jared: As I looked over your career trajectory, it seems like you got to this tech skepticism fairly early. What was it that led you to this early skepticism of technology?Nicholas:  I actually started writing about technology in 1999, which was the peak of the first dot-com boom. What’s going on with AI today is kind of similar to what was going on in 1999.  I enjoyed computers and computer networks. But then very shortly thereafter, the whole dot-com bubble burst. A lot of people who had bought into the enthusiasm and invested their retirement savings in it lost their retirement savings. I think people are naturally enthusiastic and get naturally excited by new technologies because they’re cool and interesting. But this taught me that we need to be skeptical. And back in the early dot-com boom, people were focused only on the financial and the business side. Social bulletin boards and chat rooms and stuff were dismissed as childish. It turned out that the social effects ultimately have been the biggest change of all.Jared: I revisited The Shallows recently and thought, “Wow, Carr saw something that was going to happen.” And your book was a bestseller. But the rate of technological adoption has, if anything, increased. How do you keep going?Nicholas: I draw a distinction between people listening and people changing their behavior. Compared to when I started raising some of these concerns in 2005 or 2010, when The Shallows came out, people were were still in the grip of not only enthusiasm about the internet, but a kind of worship of Big Tech companies and their leaders. We saw them as kind of saviors that were bringing this unlimited amount of information to us. And if you look at attitudes since then, they’ve changed dramatically. I’ve never considered myself fundamentally an advocate or a crusader. I’ve seen myself as a critic, and it’s not my job to change how people live. That’s up to them.Jared: How has it changed the way that you interact with technology? Because as writers or people trying to get a message out, the internet is the option. I make YouTube videos, and some of them are very critical of what online entertainment can do to you. And of course, a common comment I’ll receive is, ‘Well, why are you on YouTube?’ And my answer is that’s where everyone is. You have to go where people are to tell them how bad things are.Nicholas: I started writing a blog back in 2005 and wrote it for almost twenty years and then switched to Substack. I’ve used the internet as a platform for personal expression for a long time, and I value it as that. On the other hand, I’m very sad that it’s eroding things like print media, because I think that’s actually a better medium to get things across. But as you say, you go to where the audience is as a writer.  There’s another angle, which is that I’m writing mainly about technology, about things that I think are often having harmful effects, but I have to keep using them, because if I stop using them I’ll have nothing to write about. I have to keep researching, and researching means using the technology. So the sad fact is that even though I’m probably at this point hyper-aware of some of the negative consequences, I, too, have not really changed my behavior. I’d like to present myself as this paragon of somebody who’s figured out how to use technology productively and well, but unfortunately, I can’t do that. Jared: If you could spend decades thinking through these issues and then say ‘I’m still figuring it out,’ that might just reflect the complexity of the problem. Nicholas: It reflects the complexities of the technology, which is constantly changing, and also the complexities of human psychology. Jared: Tell me a little bit about some of the early optimism about things like radio.Nicholas: Commercial radio came around in the 1920s, but almost a century before that, we saw the invention of the telegraph, which was the first kind of electric technology. It was the first time that speech and information, human expression could move faster than human beings could carry it. The telegraph comes along and suddenly long distance communication is instantaneous. This creates huge enthusiasm — not just enthusiasm, but a kind of wonder.  For the first time, it seemed like something essential to an individual human being could be separated from their physical body and have its own life. In the book, I talk about ministers and preachers talking about this as a gift from God. It becomes this sense that because we can communicate instantaneously with basically anyone around the world, then that’s going to solve all society’s problems, because all society’s problems come from a fact that people can’t talk to each other easily. Nikola Tesla said in an interview ‘I’m going to be remembered as the guy who got rid of war.’  There’s no way you would fight somebody when you can talk to them instead. And then we have Marconi, who actually does invent radio, who says something very, very similar. He says this in 1913, and of course, in 1914 World War I breaks out. Jared: Can you tell me a little bit about this concept in the book of dissimilarity cascades?Nicholas: This concept of the dissimilarity cascades, I think, is very important. Human beings have a bias to like people who they sense are similar to themselves and to dislike people who they sense are dissimilar to themselves. And what we assume is that the more we learn about somebody else, the more we’ll see how they’re like us and therefore the more we’ll like them. While our instinct to like someone is strong, our instinct to dislike another person is actually slightly stronger. When you start getting more information about somebody, as soon as you see some way that they’re different from you, some way they’re unlike you, you start to put more and more emphasis on those differences. We begin to emphasize how they’re dissimilar to us. If you wanted to design a media system that would set off dissimilarity cascades, social media is kind of precisely what you design because it encourages people to disclose as much as possible as quickly as possible about themselves. We’re sort of these buzzing, blooming individuals, and if we present ourselves like that to others, they’re going to be overwhelmed and not know how to make sense of us. Jared: We’re asking guests to recommend a book to our listeners. Maybe it’s a book everybody should read, but nobody is. Do you have anything for them?Nicholas: If people know Neil Postman, it’s for his famous book Amusing Ourselves to Death. But after that, he wrote a shorter book called Technopoly. It looked ahead to computers and the kinds of things that are online. And I think in many ways, it was even more prophetic than Amusing Ourselves to Death. It’s also a short book, so you don’t have to have a huge attention span anymore to read it.Jared: Nicholas Carr, thank you for joining us here at The Honest Broker.Nicholas: Thanks, I enjoyed it.  Get full access to The Honest Broker at www.honest-broker.com/subscribe

How Technology Tears Us Apart

Welcome to the third installment of our interview series here at The Honest Broker—also available on our new YouTube channel and Apple Podcasts. Today, I’m happy to share my conversation with Derek Thompson.Please support The Honest Broker by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).When Derek came to Substack, he said he wanted to focus on three issues:* The Abundance agenda, building on the bestselling book he’s published with Ezra Klein.* Science in a way that’s both curious and skeptical.* The anti-social century. (Derek published a great piece on the subject at The Atlantic in January.)I wanted to focus on that last issue in our conversation. This intersects with issues about which I care deeply: the loneliness epidemic, alienation driven by adoption of new technologies, and the impact of AI on our lives. You can find more of Derek’s work on his newsletter. Highlights from the Derek Thompson InterviewFor the full interview, check out the video at the top of the page.Jared: Derek Thompson, thanks for joining us.Derek: It’s wonderful to be here.Jared: When you launched your newsletter, you had this nice sort of thesis statement. You said ‘I’m going to cover three topics.’ One was them was the Abundance agenda, the other was covering science in a way that’s both curious and skeptical. And then there was a third: the anti-social century. That one stuck out to me. How bad is it out there?Derek: I think many writers live with a kind of hypocrisy at the heart of their work. And I would say that my personal hypocrisy is that I’m mostly optimistic about science and technology, but I’m also pessimistic about the social changes that come with science and technology. And so in a weird way, I find myself often writing about how thrilled we should be about all sorts of advances in medical technology and biotech. I’m fascinated, by the way, with just GLP-1s and everything they seem to do. And at the same time, I find myself consistently drawn to the way that modernity changes habits and behaviors in ways I find often quite bad. I wrote this cover story for The Atlantic on the phenomenon that I called the anti-social century. And the antisocial century emerged really from one key statistic that I found in the American Time Use Survey. One of the things that they ask is, how much time do you spend socializing with other people in face-to-face communication? And the key statistic that I found is that the average amount of face-to-face socializing in this century has declined for all Americans by about 20% and for young Americans by about 40 to 50%. What I’m identifying here is the fact that in the 25 years since Robert Putnam wrote Bowling Alone there has been an antisocial quarter of a century. It touches the anxiety crisis that we see among young people. I think it changes our politics by alienating us from our neighbors. I think there are so many different tendrils that emerge from the phenomenon of the anti-social century. Jared: There’s a bit of an irony when you read Bowling Alone. He has a very optimistic chapter about the internet. When he’s writing around the year 2000, the internet is still new. And he’s like, oh, we’re going to form community networks. People are going to organize ways to go out together. They’re going to use the internet to have conversations with their neighbors.Derek: Oops!Jared: In a revised introduction to the second edition, he admits that he whiffed it. He was wrong. He thought it could maybe bring us together, especially if we created small, intentional, locally based communities. He was essentially imagining the Nextdoor app, which is of course a cesspit. No one thinks ‘Wow, I like my neighbors more because we interact on Nextdoor.’ So, I guess we could ask specifically about what the internet is doing. Because I know lots of 14-year-olds, and you’ll ask them how they spend time with their friends. And the number one answer they give is Discord. It’s sitting in voice chats rather than going out. They might watch YouTube videos and stream them live and then just talk over voice chat. Even with people who are in the same city as them! I grew up on the internet, but there was still a sense that there was your online life, but then you go and do stuff. To put it very coarsely, there’s just been this massive decline in going out and doing stuff. Derek: There’s a huge decline in going out and doing stuff. There’s specifically a huge decline in partying. This was one of the single biggest pieces I’ve written on Substack so far: ‘The Death of Partying in the USA.’ I think the way the American Time Youth Survey puts it is hosting or attending parties, social events, or ceremonies has declined something like 70% for young people. You might ask: how do you know that texting people or hanging out on Discord or playing a video game with your bros in your headset isn’t a perfect substitution for hanging out in the physical world that makes us just as happy? That’s a very complicated and rich question. I think it deserves a lot of research. But I think it’s important to put two facts next to each other. Number one: the decline of face-to-face socializing. Number two: the fact that people, and young people in particular, are not happy with their lives. I do want to point out that this incredibly important shift in the way that we are with each other in our friendships and our relationships has coincided with an absolute plummeting of life satisfaction. And one reason I think Putnam was wrong is that we aren’t ourselves on the internet. Jared: There’s an idea that I’ve been toying with more and more that one of the reasons that we’re so comfortable being mean to each other online is that it’s very easy to view each platform that you’re on or each account that you have as a different self. It’s like a completely different personality that I get to try out. You get to A/B test the self, and you don’t immediately feel the negative social consequences because you could just make another account. Where in real life, there’s no rebranding.Derek: I don’t think I’ve ever quite put it like that. Just to challenge it: I don’t really believe that most people think of themselves as being a kind of unified self in every circumstance. There’s who I am at the office. There’s who I am at home. We are different people in different circumstances. And that’s a truth that pre-exists and co-exists with the internet itself. But I do think there’s a kernel of truth in what you’re saying. I have a sense as I move throughout my day that I’m a different, I’m purposefully code-shifting and self-shifting as I move between contexts. And so I do think that you might be right that a part of what we’re putting our finger on here, a part of what makes the internet strange, is that we assume these kind of sideways identities that are related to us but not fully us. There’s a deliberate sense of performance. What I think is causing that is the distinction between one-to-one communication and broadcast. That’s always a weird thing about podcasts. When you’re having a one-to-one conversation, a real one, like if there weren’t cameras here, I would have no choice but to just focus on you. But when I’m typing into a box, where I’m holding a self-facing camera for YouTube or for Instagram, I can’t think about any other one particular person. And because I can’t focus on 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 people at once, I’m really focused on myself. Jared: I occasionally will meet someone who’s maybe seen some of my YouTube videos, and they’ll say I’m quieter than they expected. I don’t even have a particularly large personality on YouTube.Derek: But there’s no listening on YouTube. Why would you ever make a video of you listening?Jared: Exactly. I guess if that form of communication is so unnatural, then it seems plausible to say that it’s bound to have some at least strange consequences when it becomes the dominant form of communication. When most of your communication is broadcast rather than face-to-face, how you think about communication is going to eventually shift.Derek: There are studies that have basically been done, I think at Penn Wharton, that show that if you write a letter to one person versus writing a letter that you know many people will read, the contents of that letter change. When you’re writing to a thousand people, you just talk about yourself. And so just knowing that you’re going from talking to one person versus many people makes the content of the message more focused on the self. I think you could extrapolate a finding like that to the idea that we’re moving from a more physical world to a more digital world conversation. I find that when I’m talking to other people, I’m living in their mind a lot of the time. To be in front of your phone, posting, you’re not inside of any one person’s mind. You’re often inside of your own. I do think that maybe one reason why we have rising rates of anxiety and depression is that people who are anxious and depressed are lost inside of their own thoughts.Jared: I have been wondering about the turn that people have toward forming relationships with various LLMs, with various forms that we call AI. You wrote a piece about the way that people are turning to AI for therapy. I  believe the website Catholic Answers released a sort of AI priest who would give spiritual advice. Then he said heretical things, and they quickly defrocked him. On Reddit, there are whole subreddits dedicated to forming relationships with AI. So more and more we’re turning to having these very intimate conversations with machines rather than human beings.Derek: I think there’s two questions there that are both really interesting. Question number one is, why is AI so good at being a therapist? And then two, what’s the cost of turning to AI as a therapist or a friend if it seems to be working for people? My wife’s a clinical psychologist. I’ve talked to people in her program about the fact that they consider AI to be quite a talented therapist at delivering cognitive behavioral therapy in certain steps and exposure therapies. Some therapy is quite schematic, like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. And so these are skills that I think you really could teach in artificial intelligence. Another part of being a good therapist is validation. This technology is very good at doing lots of things that therapists are supposed to do, but a great therapist is not just a professional validator.  There are people who have obsessive compulsive disorder. Their compulsions are disordered. AI is not as good at telling people that their delusions are delusional, that their problems are actually problematic, that their thought patterns are actually disordered. People who get into these long conversations with LLMs end up in some cases going to the hospital because their delusions are deepened by their interaction with these technologies, not resolved or remedied by their interactions with them. A part of being a good therapist is telling your patients when they’re wrong. A part of being a good friend is telling your friends when they’re nuts. And this technology has been honed through both engineering and human feedback to be sycophantic. The problem that you’re identifying is larger than just AI as a therapist or AI as a friend. This really, I do think, is a fundamental problem with artificial intelligence, period. It can’t tell you when you’re asking the wrong question. What I see is an engine for the mass production of narcissism at scaleJared: You’ve also written on the literacy crisis in the United States or the decline of reading. Do you think that this is in any way related to your interest in the antisocial century?Derek: I do think we’re seeing the end among college students of writing as well. We’re already seeing the decline of reading. Now we’ve invented this tool whereby if you’re assigned take-home essay on anything—a book or a piece of history—you can turn to a large language model and it will essentially write that essay for you. If thinking is like pitching and throwing a baseball is practicing for pitching, what is practicing for thinking? I think it’s reading and writing. And so if we now have clear statistical and anecdotal evidence that people are reading less and outsourcing the learned skill of writing to large language models, where is deep thinking supposed to come from in the future?Jared: We’re looking for book recommendations for our audience. Do you have something for us?Derek: Philipp Blom’s The Vertigo Years. Not only is it an absolute blast to read, it is about the period of time that I consider most interesting in human history. It’s an era where so much of what we consider to be the modern world was invented. We didn’t just invent cars and planes. We invented aspirin and basketball. It’s a beautiful book in explaining essentially how these inventions made the Western world lose its mind.Jared: Derek Thompson, thank you for joining us.Derek: Thank you. Get full access to The Honest Broker at www.honest-broker.com/subscribe

Derek Thompson on the Anti-Social Century

James Marriott is a columnist at The Times of London and the author of Cultural Capital here on Substack. He recently published ‘The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society’, an article about the worldwide literacy crisis, which was a platform-wide sensation.The literacy crisis is one of my interests as well. I’ve previously been interviewed on the subject alongside James at UnHerd, and I’ve released multiple YouTube videos about the subject, too. So, I knew I needed to ask him to sit down for interview on The Honest Broker. Get full access to The Honest Broker at www.honest-broker.com/subscribe

James Marriott on the Post-Literate Society

This is a big day at The Honest Broker, and I have several important announcements to make.First, we’re launching a video interview series. In the coming weeks, we will share in-depth interviews with the leading thinkers and writers of our time. Our goal is simple: Smart conversations with smart people.Please support The Honest Broker by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).These will be available here on Substack, but also on YouTube and other platforms. Here’s a link to our new YouTube channel—I encourage you to subscribe.I also want to introduce the host of our interview series, Jared Henderson. I’ve admired Jared’s work for a long time. He’s a philosopher by training, and a brilliant commentator on the pressing issues and leading ideas of our time. He’s also a popular YouTuber and Substacker, and is working on his debut book (entitled The Intellectual Life) for Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Random House.I’m delighted to have him join me at The Honest Broker.Finally, I want to introduce our debut guest for the interview series. Cory Doctorow has been an incisive commentator on culture and technology for many years. But he is also a novelist, activist, blogger, web entrepreneur, and public gadfly of the highest order.Cory has a new book coming out today, entitled Enshittification, and this promises to be one of the most widely discussed topics of our time.Below is a transcript of some highlights from the interview. You can watch the interview in its entirety at the video link above. HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE CORY DOCTOROW INTERVIEWJared: We are here to talk about your new book, Enshittification, and I wanted to ask you what it’s like to be a guy who coined this term that became word of the year at several online dictionaries and has also entered internet slang so widely.Cory: It’s very exciting to have entered the lexicon of so many people. It’s not just Internet slang. It gets used in a lot of different contexts. I hear people talk about the enshittification of endocrinology and the enshittification of F1 and so on. So it’s definitely gone beyond just online services, although I coined it with a very precise technical meaning, a meaning that relates to the specific contours of how digital platforms go bad.Jared: Talk a bit about what you mean exactly by enshittification. Everyone understands, or they all sense, that the internet has gotten worse, the world has gotten worse, the technologies that we use regularly have gotten worse, but you go beyond that. It’s not just that it has gotten so bad. There’s a cycle that it follows. Could you elaborate on that?Cory: Well, look, I’m very happy for people to use this colloquially. If 10 million normies use this to just mean things get worse, and 1 million of them go figure out what I mean by that, that’s a million people I never would have reached.Platforms are the endemic form of enterprise on the internet. It’s an intermediary. It’s a business that connects two or more groups. And these platforms go bad in this very typical way. First, they’re good to end users, and they find a way to lock those end users in. And then once the end users are locked into the Roach Motel—users check in, but they don’t check out—they make things a little worse for those end users, knowing that they can’t readily leave. And the reason they make things worse for end users is not out of sadism. It’s because often the things that are good for end users are bad for business customers and vice versa. And that’s stage two. But in stage three, once the platform has both end users and business customers locked in, it can claw back all the value for itself.Jared: There’s one case of enshittification that I can discuss with anyone, and they immediately recognize it: Google search, which makes up a fairly large portion of your book.Cory: Google acquired a 90% market share for search, and they did so illegally. Everywhere you might find a search box, Google paid millions or billions of dollars to make sure that was wired into Google’s own servers. The problem with a 90% search market share, which sounds very good, is that you can’t grow it, right? Google could breed a million humans to maturity and make them into Google customers, and that would be Google Classroom, but it’s a slow process to raise a billion humans to maturity.Jared: Google would probably decide that at about age six, the product should be killed.Cory: That’s right! They go to the Google graveyard. So Google gets into a panic about not growing in search anymore. And we see this clash of these two key executives at Google. And we see this because the DOJ published the email correspondence. There’s this guy, Pragavar Raghavan, who’s an ex-McKinsey guy, and he’s in charge of revenue for Google search. Raghavan’s idea to grow Google search revenue is to make Google search worse. You’re going to have to search twice or maybe three times to get the answer you’re looking for. And that’s two or three times we can show you ads.Jared: So why don’t we talk about some of these disciplines that sort of are there originally to help prevent enshittification. You mentioned competition and regulation. There was one that you mentioned that I thought was really interesting, which was self-help.Cory: In politics and in law, self-help is a measure that you can take on your own without having to wait for a policymaker or an enforcer to act on your behalf. In the digital world, we’ve had this incredible and powerful form of direct self-help because digital technology is uniquely flexible in a way that’s very hard to maybe get your head around if you’re not like someone who is into the kind of theory of computer science.Every computer that we know how to make is capable of running every program that is valid. And what this means is that for every 10-foot pile of s**t that some platform installs in their product, there is an 11-foot dis-enshittifying ladder that you can install in your computer that goes over it. Starting in the late 90s and accelerating through this whole century, we have seen the expansion of a suite of laws, commonly called IP laws. But the best way to understand what someone in business means when they say, ‘I have some IP here’ is what they mean is ‘I have a right I’ve secured in law that allows me to control the conduct of my customers, my critics, and my competitors.’Jared: This is not limited to the purely sort of what we think of as the digital world. And that’s because the digital world is not confined to your laptop browser. Everything has a computer chip in it. Everything is being sort of filtered through some kind of app interface. So, if I want to do something to my refrigerator, it has a computer chip in it, and then it can be protected under the DMCA.Cory: GE has a charcoal replaceable filter in their fridges. Its bill of materials is about eight cents. They charge $50 for it, but they also have a 25-cent chip in it that stops you from using a generic cartridge. And bypassing that chip is a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine.Jared: What are the large-scale, structural solutions? Maybe give me the two-minute version of that. What would it be like if we’re going to build a better internet and a better world?Cory: Well, I’m glad you said structural. There really isn’t anything you can do as an individual. If you’re in an election where you vote with your wallet, then the guy with the fattest wallet is going to win every time, which is why rich people want us to only vote with our wallets. You have to be part of a polity. To make a structural change, you have to be part of a structure. I’ve worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation for 24 years. We have a national network in the United States of affiliate groups called the Electronic Frontier Alliance. They work on state and local issues. That is one place where you could get started today. Go to efa.eff.org, and you can find a local group. And if you can’t find one, you can start one.Jared: Well, the last question I want to ask you is something we ask all of our guests. We’re looking for book recommendations for our audience. We’re looking for books that you think everybody should read. What’s a book you would recommend?Cory: It’s a book by Theodora Goss. She is a Hungarian-American science fiction writer, and it is called Letters from an Imaginary Country. It is extraordinarily beautifully written science fiction that is very weird, but also very accessible. She’s such a talented prose stylist; every word is like a drink of wine. And so I cannot recommend it enough. It’s from a small press called Tachyon Press, but you should be able to get it in any bookstore.Jared: As with all of our book recommendations, we’ll put that down in the description. Cory, thank you so much for joining us.Cory: Thank you. Get full access to The Honest Broker at www.honest-broker.com/subscribe