Speaker 1: Slightly jokingly, but not entirely jokingly. My theory is that
the Singularity actually already happened over the period that Britney
Spears was locked up. Roughly speaking, I don't know that
it's connected directly to Britney Spears, but approximately the point
where they locked Britney up was also the point when
the first iPhone dropped, and the point where they let
her out was also the point where the lockdowns ended.
And between the launch of the propagation of smartphones and
the effect of lockdowns enforcing the rump, the sort of
residual resistant rump of the culture onto the Internet, we've
now where decisively a digital first culture, certainly across the
English speaking world, and I would say probably across most
of the so called developed world and beyond it as well.
So that's where we are now. And I think it
was I mean that we were in the middle of
that great upheaval in the twenty tens when I said
my life became less crazy. And also it wasn't a
coincidence that the world also began going crazy. Over the
course of the Singularity, some really important things started to
dissolve very quickly in terms of how we organize information
and knowledge and what we think the world is.
Speaker 2: This is Jonathan Pehel. Welcome to the Symbolic World.
Speaker 3: Hello everyone, I'm here with the very recognizable Mary Harrington.
You know, we just had a conversation up not that
long ago, and Mary is going to be one of
the speakers at the Symbolic World Summit in May, so
May fourteenth to the sixteenth in Ohio. Will have obviously
links to that down below. And so I thought that,
you know, because the theme of our conference is retelling
the cosmic epic. You know, there's a way in which
we are part of this great story that's happening. And
so I thought for me at least to be an
opportunity to find out a little bit more about Mary's
story and how it fits into some of the things
that are happening.
Speaker 2: So Mary, thanks for talking.
Speaker 1: To me, Thank you for having me.
Speaker 3: You know, I would think that, how can I say this,
I think that like if when you started writing, you know,
several years ago, and you started to kind of appear
on the public in the public arena, I think people
would have been very surprised that I would have invited
you to come to something like the symbolic worl summit
with like an Orthodox priest as a speaker, and you know,
all of these types of people. But for now it
seems like it's completely natural that you are one of
the speakers. It was you were one of the first
ideas that my team had for you know, to come speak.
And I'm trying to figure out exactly. I mean, I
have a sense of what's going on of why that's
the case, you know, why is it that we're in
this moment now, But I'd like to kind of hear
it from you. That is, in the past several years,
it feels what and I kind of watch you go,
it feels like you've you've changed quite a bit in
terms of you're maybe not your attitude towards life, but
at least some of your some of your perspectives. I
think the first time I saw you was with an
interview with Paul kings North back in the day with
Rebel Wisdom.
Speaker 2: That was the first time that I saw that I
saw you.
Speaker 3: And so I mean, I would like to hear a
little bit about, first of all, kind of where you
come from, like how you first of all came to
be a writer, What was motivating you.
Speaker 1: I've always made a living from writing, but I kind
of did it. I did it in the direction that
people don't normally do it in in the sense that
I did. But I did fifteen years in the at
the cold face in commercial copywriting, and then accidentally became
a journalist, and generally the trajectory goes the other way.
But I I, yeah, I'm not completely sure how it happens.
I think, I mean, when you say, how did I
become a writer? I think it's it's probably more accurate
to say that I've always composed. It's literally the only
thing I've ever been in the good at writing. I
can I don't know. I don't know if I don't
think it's overstating things to say I can taste words.
There's something very synesthetic for me about language. It's just
it's my happy place. And then the reason the reason
I wasn't writing in public before is I mean, I
was writing in public before, but either the world wasn't.
I don't know. I I in the world were too
far apart for that really to be a mainstream thing.
I wrote crazy stuff. I was kind of crazy. I
was pretty unemployable.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's it's all.
Speaker 1: It's all the sort of classic you know, you know
in the front covers of books you see you see
like the little orthobiography, and they've been like a fish,
you know, a fish gutter, and a janitor, and you know,
a book salesman and just all of these other terrible
jobs that they obviously all hated. I mean that was
basically me I did. I sucked at everything I did
and just didn't really like I worked for money and
wrote in my spare time or blogged or actually increasingly
on the Internet while I was supposed to be working.
I mean, that was me sat at my desk kind
of scrolling when I was meant to be working, or
compulsively posting on forums or whatever.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, this is this is this.
Speaker 1: Is not a not an uncommon phenomenon. But so I mean,
in that sense, I always was. It's just that something,
something happened in the late twenty tens that made it possible.
I don't know if it's that I became more sane
by virtue of having settled down, like by then I
was in my thirties and I was a mum, and
you know, I was married, and like the rest of
my life was sufficiently stable that I just wasn't quite
as crazy anymore. And I mean, you can do you
can do the causality there whichever way you like. Either
I became sufficiently crazy to settle down, or I settled
down and therefore became less. I don't know. I don't
know which one around it worked. But yeah, somehow those
two things came together. And also the world went crazy
at the same time, so you know, we kind of
met each other going the other way. But also and
the Internet, I mean, I sort of slightly, slightly jokingly,
but not entirely jokingly. My theory is that the singularity
actually already happened over the period that Britney Spears was
locked up. Roughly speaking, I don't think, I don't know
that it's connected directly to Britney Spears, but approximately the
point where they locked Britney up was also the point
when the first iPhone dropped, and the point where they
let her out was also the point where the lockdowns ended.
And between the launch of the propagation of smartphones and
the effect of lockdowns enforcing the rump, the sort of
residual resistant rump of the culture onto the Internet, we've
now where decisively a digital first culture, certainly across the
English speaking world, and I would say probably across most
of the so called developed world and beyond it as well.
So that's where we are now. And I think it
was I mean that we were in the middle of
that kind of that grate upheaval in the twenty tens
when I I said my life became less crazy. And
also I think not not not, I'm not it wasn't
a coincidence that the world also began going crazy over
the course of the Singularity, because just you know, the
kind of some really important things started to dissolve very
quickly in terms of how we how we organize information
and knowledge, and how we what we think the world is.
And and I just got lucky. Was there is the
rest of the story. I got lucky. My daughter was
about three, I was I was at at home mum,
you know, and it's you know, when your your kid
gets to about three, they don't need you quite as intensely,
so you have more time. And I mean, there was
a lot going on politically, and I was a real
news junkie, and I remember thinking, you know, why shouldn't
it be me there's all of these people publishing opinions
on the Internet when I have I'm not short of those.
Why shouldn't you know, I've always been okay at writing.
I should have a go and I did, And literally
that's just all happened, you know. I wrote a couple
of pieces, and then Unheard got in touch with me
to say, oh, do you know, do you want to do?
You want to pitch? And I did, and I think
about three columns later, they offered me a contract. And
literally that was just sheer chance. They happened to be
getting going at a point where so was I, and
we we got on. You know, I've been Unheard's been
home for me as a writer ever since, and everything
else just fell out the back of that. It turns
out that I really like writing and people like publishing me.
So here I still learn so And I mean, if
you're your opener was was sort of something. What I'm
hearing from you is Mary's Mary's views have evolved considerably,
or you know, Mary's Mary's Mary as an Internet persona
has evolved considerably over the course of those eight years.
And I think that's true. But I don't feel like mine.
I don't feel like my basic worldview has altered very much.
It's more, it's more that as we get further into
whatever whatever on whatever the flip this is that's going on,
things like things become easier to talk about because they're
more part of everybody's familiar reality that just weren't very
obvious to people before. And one of those things is
what is the one of my my one of my
current interests, which is, you know, what do means mean?
I mean, this is something that we talked about in
our in our last conversation over at Socrates Dialogues. You
know what is the meaning of means? What does it mean?
You know what's actually going on there? And this is
but I mean, but but for me that maps like
this is this is not a this is not a
new interest. This is a long standing one. I was
completely obsessed in the back in the aughts with the
meaning of wikis and the social implications of wikis and
the and what how because my my undergraduate degree and
my my great love was English literature, and I was
I was lucky to get a fairly solid grounding in
mean canonical English literature pretty much from Beowulf to nineteen
forty five or so, and I was just really I was.
I was fascinated when I first met the Internet because
it felt so so fundamentally part of that story, you know,
and very and in ways which were radically new but
also radically old. And so this is all stuff that
I've been thinking about for at least twenty years. It's
it's more if you know, if it's if I'm talking
more explicitly and more publicly about it now, it's simply
that we have more of a common language for doing
that because more people are trying to figure out what
on earth just happened. It's not just the preserve of
crazies and occultists and you know, religious eccentrics and you know,
people in cupboards full of books anymore. It's it's it's
it's everybody's.
Speaker 2: Problem, right, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean.
Speaker 1: This is this is kind of what this is your
and I think this is this is how you end
up with Mary in conversation with Jonathan Paja, because this
is kind of your project as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely, you know, and I think I when you
say that the singularity happened, you know, are read, Uh,
I'm curious, what is it that you mean, what is
it that you mean by that? Do you mean that
this fusion, let's say, between the human world and the
digital world, Is that what you mean by the singularity?
Speaker 1: Okay, So I mean there are there are competing definite
even within the nerdosphere, there are competing definitions of what,
you know, what we mean by singularity, And like we
this is it's kind of boring, you know, it's like
it's like fine fine gradations of you know, latimistic philosophy.
It's like it's you know, you really can get into
the weeds. But it's kind of boring. So so so
let's not go there. But like you know, and I'll
have a slightly slightly kind of cheeky definition of singularity,
you know, I mean the broadest sense, it means the
point at which we fuse, we merge with our own technologies,
such that we can no longer understand where such as,
such that we go through transformation in consciousness and can
no longer comprehend that we can't comprehend from where we
are now, and such that we will no longer comprehend
our previous self from having gone through the looking glass.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, okay, that you mad.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to I'm trying to be sort of technology
tech agnostic about this, and I mean the in the
general in the sort of tech oh sphere, what what's
generally being referred to is something something where it's imagined
that we're able to rewrite our bodies or embodiment or
our capacity to think, or you know, extend consciousness throughout
the cosmos, and you rewrite the basic building blocks of
reality using computers and various kind of fanciful things like that.
But it all it sort of cashes out as various
kind of tech optimist versions of the rapture.
Speaker 2: Right, that's hilarious. Yeah, exactly, it's a very.
Speaker 1: It's it has a very milleneri and flavor. Yeah, will
be taken up into this new world and nothing that
comes after will be imaginable.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: But I think, I mean, my sense is that both
of us, I think so in terms of politics. That's
one of the reasons why I think that we're able
to discuss is also we we have a a neither
doomer vision of let's say, the technology, but definitely not
a definitely not a kind of ideological idea or like
a futurist notion of what's happening. So there's a sense
in which we realize this like this is where we are,
Like we also can't totally go back.
Speaker 2: You know, it's very difficult.
Speaker 3: Too, It's very difficult to disconnect from this world. I
mean you can, but then if you do, then you'll
have no influence over.
Speaker 1: It, that's right.
Speaker 3: So how it would be this this position, like how
to navigate this place where we both like say, okay,
hold on to your children, like, hug your kids, you know,
get that human you need that human connection, go to church,
participate in the world. But also it doesn't mean that
we have to totally disconnect from this this this other world.
Speaker 1: Marshall mccullin's advice was pray and pay attention, which I
think is actually very deep. You know, we could talk
about just that, just that sentence, probably for an hour
or two. Maybe maybe we'll come.
Speaker 2: Back to it.
Speaker 1: But yeah, absolutely absolutely, I mean it's it would be
it would be kind of ironic for me to be
posting posting paid articles on substat complaining about the technology
which is allowing me to do that, right, Yeah, I
mean you can, you can, but you know there's a
sort of you know that there's a layer of reflexivity there,
which is sort of it's best to like. Technologies are
not neutral, but there are there are as many upsides
to these, to the digital ones, as there are potential negatives.
I mean, for exactly, it's it's inconceivable or well, very
much more difficult to conceive that you and I would
be having this conversation here we are here, we ask
many thousands of miles apart. I think, yeah, I think
we're many thousands of miles apart right now. You know,
certainly we're in we're in very different time zones as
we have this conversation, and that that itself is a
is a remarkable phenomenon which is essentially made possible by
this digital revolution. So while while I have many I
have many, it's a very two edged sword, right, you know,
and it dissolves a lot of things that we take
for granted, some which are really nice. I think it's
not unambiguously a bad thing. It's just definitely not a
neutral one, and the meaning of it is not exhausted
by the things you can do with it.
Speaker 3: One of the things, for sure, I think that what
you pointed to is right is that there's something about
the liquefication of these relationship where everything, all of these
natural connections that we have, let's say, in our families
and our communities are dissolving. And but what it does
is that it also surprisingly creates the types of networks
that could not have been possible before. And that's why
you end up having these weird connections where I can
talk to a neuroscientists, or I can talk to a philosopher,
or I can talk to an artist, and for some reason,
the you know, people are willing to entertain those conversations.
People are interested in hearing how there's cross pollenization.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: We let's say, up to the war, let's say, or
even after the war, this kind of hyper specialization was
what was leading us. And then in this moment, it
feels like that specialization is becoming weaker, and so there's
a possibility of a new a new you know, like
a new renaissance or something that brings everything together. I
said I would never do it again, but here we are.
We are announcing the Symbolic World Summit in May twenty
twenty six. I have so many great people around me
that I'm just excited to do it, even though I
thought it would be crazy to do it again.
Speaker 4: Our summit's going to be from May fourteenth through sixteenth
in Broadview Heights, Ohio. You can buy tickets at Symbolic
World Summit dot com. We have early bird pricing going
right now, fifty dollars off of general admission and VIP tickets.
Kenot speakers this year are father Josiah Trenham and doctor
Mary Harrington, which is a combination nobody knew that they wanted.
But I think it's going to be absolutely incredible. And
of course Jonathan and I will be speaking, as well
as several people from around the Symbolic World community.
Speaker 3: A lot of people that you like that you've seen
are going to be there, are going to come. We're
going to have book signings, there will be a lot
of time.
Speaker 2: For people to meet and to greet.
Speaker 3: We're also doing Supra as well, and so come and
join us. We can't wait for this and we're excited
to meet you in person.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a different way of a different way of framing
that one that I was actually thinking about earlier today.
So Walter On, who's a Jesuit literary scholar, I think
he's I think he died quite recently, but he wrote
he wrote in the latter half of the twentieth century
about the transition from orality, which is to say, spoken
world cultures, to literacy, and wrote a very very influential
study on on that, on on how how transformative that
is that the level of culture and consciousness and social organization.
You've huge number of other things like that. And one
of the one of the points he makes almost in
passing and doesn't really follow it up in the in
this book Orality in Literacy, is that the printing press
was the first template. It was the original template of
the industrial process as such, in that it breaks up
words into into their constitution. I mean, the alphabet breaks
up words into sounds, but the printing press made those
sounds into little physical objects which you then arrange within
a frame, and then you use that in a sort
of duplicative process, which is in turn organized within a
social a social assembly line process, and that then becomes
you know, two hundred years before the Industrial revolution proper,
that template was there in Gutenberg's printing press, which just
blew my mind as a thought to think that this
was actually as just how revolutionary that was as a
concept and then when you think about it, I think
this point has been elaborated by a couple of others. Definitely,
that template, that industrial process then becomes the template for
reality itself. You know, people, people, you know, so a
few hundred years later, people are thinking of reality as
something as little little balls that are assembled in different
patterns in which you can rearrange, you know, with with
with enough technicity and enough skill and enough precision.
Speaker 2: Tool, and you can you can move around.
Speaker 1: And yes, And I was thinking, you know, so, so
what so what does it and so so so if
if the if that template for manufacturing has has become
a sort of generalized template for industrial society as such,
what does it do to our anthropologies and our social
organizations to have come out the other side of it?
Mm hmm, because we no longer live in a world
that's organized according to the template of print and industrial
assembly lines. I mean, you know, the West is the
West de industrialized some decades ago, and where we're kind
of de industrializing, you know, where where we've come all
the way to the end of that arc in the
sense that where that that we're not we've we've now
decisively de industrialized or posted industrialized the word in the
you know, print print isn't the primary medium anymore. But
it's this is not to say that we've come out
in the precisely the pre modern world. We've come out
somewhere new, you know, we've I mean, AI is definitely
not the pre modern world. It's something it's something altogether new,
and you know, that's the sort of you know what
the meaning of AI is in the Marshall mccluan censors
of technology is something which yeah, I think about, I
think about a lot. I haven't come to any particularly
snappy conclusions yet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it.
Speaker 1: Seems it seems to me that that the anthropological and
the the anthropological and the social implications of embracing that
as a template for for the word are immense and
not nearly not nearly sufficiently well explored yet.
Speaker 3: Well, for sure, I think that the AI is seems
to be the the the prophecy mcclune's prophecy about the
this kind of electric nervous system and how it would
it would basically join together into to a kind of
cosmic brain or like a you know, like a all
of humanity would be joined together into this brain. It
seems that AI is doing that because AI the only
way they were able to make AI work is to
farm intelligence. It's like the opposite of the matrix, you know,
where in the matrix they're farming your bio like energy,
but in AI, they're actually farming your quality, like your
capacity to judge good from bad. And so humans are
giving are training the AI. But it's basically humans that
are telling the AI what is good and bad and
then it like coalesces into this into these giant brains.
But we have to also remember that mccluan when he
was predicting that was saying that that's the Antichrist, like
he wasn't he wasn't People always think mcclun is some
like futurists and some hit futurists, but no, mclun was
like a traditional ethic and he was saying, pay attention
to this, like you said, you know, as humanity kind
infuses together towards this this like giant brain. Uh, it's
there's a very large chance that this is going to
be the the nervous system of the Antichrist, you know,
And so you know, even as even as a writer,
you know, how do you I mean be interesting to
know how you use AI actually, like in what what
what way do you use it?
Speaker 2: And what way do you refuse to use it?
Speaker 1: For example, I do not don't. That's a that's an
interesting question. I don't use it to write my sentences
because I like writing sentences. I do, I do use
I treat it. I treat it as a tool, like
it's not it's not a thinking. It's not thinking for me.
You know, it's an extension. It's an extension of thought.
It's very good at you know, given given sufficiently clear parameters,
it's very good at large scale pattern recognition or you know,
if you you want, you want it to you can
use it to do a sort of preliminary liter literature search.
For example, you know, what, what are the five most
important texts on bar and summarize them for me? You know,
you won't, you know, asking the AI to summarize it
for you is not It's different in kind from reading
it and then drawing out you know whatever whatever it prompts,
whatever those whatever that experience of reading would would prompt
or delicit from your from your existing patterns of thought,
and you know, mentally stored reflections and so on. It's
a very different thing. But like you know, there's only
so many hours in the day, and if you really
just need, if you if you just need like the
two page summary of what so and so said, you like,
it's okay, but you have you have to as long
as you remember that it's not thinking, it doesn't really
know what you need, and and you really do need
to check its work because it does frequently make things up.
And when with all of those provisos, you can use
it as a as a research system. M hm, Like,
I really it's kind of well, I mean, you know,
it's a robot, but as long as you're remember that
it's a robot robot, you have a robot researcher system.
And I think you know that's like I use a car,
I don't, I don't insist on walking everywhere. And I
think you know that's sort of and as long as
you as long as you remember that it's an extension,
not a substitute, I think that's that's licit. And we
also use it in our family for language learning. You know,
there are there are there are very very successful and
popular language learning apps like you know, I'm not I'm
not able to teach my daughter Italian, but she wants
to learn Italian. She's doing it pretty well at learning Italian.
Speaker 2: You know, this is and.
Speaker 1: Again there comes provided that's oriented towards real human I
r L interactions with Italian speakers. I feel like that's
that that's that's a that's illicit extension of what we'd
be able to offer educationally.
Speaker 2: Where where I.
Speaker 1: Think you get into sort of category category era with
this stuff is where where you confuse it, where you
forget that it's not sentient, or you treat it as
a substitute for the you know, judgment or wise counsel
or relationality or human intimacy, all of those things. You know,
it's sort of it's okay, it's synthesizing under under certain circumstances,
but it can go hideously wrong, and ultimately it's not sentient.
So you know, that's that's sort of like like like mistaking,
mistaking your hat for the cat. You know, at the
end of the way, it really is just a hat.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Speaker 3: And uh so I want to come back a little
bit to to my original idea of why would I
wanted to ask you? And so, let's say in the past,
since you started writing publicly, and you've kind of appeared
on the on the public. You know, a lot of
things have changed in the culture, a lot of things
have changed politically, a lot of things.
Speaker 2: Have have had You know, how.
Speaker 3: As your own personal story or your own personal thought,
how has it tracked with the world changing, or how
has it resisted, or how have you seen the relationship
between the changes in your own life and the things
that are happening around us.
Speaker 1: Again, that's a really interesting one. I mean, it's one
I think about a lot in the sense that I'm
a creature of books, but I'm also a creature of
the Internet. Like I'm not quite net native, you know.
I think I was eighteen or maybe even eighteen or
nineteen before I got my first email address, So I
grew up in a world entirely without that sort of
digital other world. But I love the digital other world,
you know. You know this in the same way that
somebody who's like, there's somebody who's moved to a foreign
country and naturalized and just loves the local festivals and
food and joins in with all of the stuff, but
isn't quite like, you know, they were born there. That's
kind of me on the Internet, and you know, I'll
I'll always Internet with a with a with a literary
with a book person's accent. Even if it's very slight,
I can always spot. I can always spot people of
my exact generation online in their posting style, because they
all they all posted the same accent, you know, a
very slight foreign accent like Zoomers on the other hand.
Zoomer's on the other hand, they have no accent to
talk because they just grew up there.
Speaker 2: Yet different thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they grow up online. It's a completely different sensibility.
But but my my generation, which is the same mid forties,
so the Internet with a slight accent, and once, once
you're attuned to it, it's unmistakable. And I can spot
those guys even if even if they just have like
some random picture as a as their profile.
Speaker 2: Right, right, even if you don't know the name, you
can figure.
Speaker 1: Even if I don't know their name, I'm like, you're
you're within five years of my age. I can just
I just know, and then eventually you know, and when
I get an opportunity to ask, I'm always right. But anyway,
I mean, that's a that's a slight slidebar how how
like I or this is a really randabout way of saying,
like what's going on on the Internet is part of
what it means to be me, like in the sense
of being being an extension of myself. Like Internet discourses,
you know, inhabit me to the same to the extent,
to the same extent as I inhabit Internet discourses. You know,
I try and moderate that a bit these days, because
it's all got very much more cynical and sometimes really
adversarial there. But there's there's a sense like I really
enjoy that sense of wandering the byways of the Internet,
and you know, the serendipity that can occur there, and
you know, the red the other humans you could the
other people you can meet there, and you know, some
of my I have extraordinary friendships that couldn't have come
about without just moodling around there seeing what would turn up.
Speaker 2: Like I love I really I love the Internet.
Speaker 1: But you know, platforms don't Platforms don't last. They seem
to have a so so far so they seem to
have a sort of a natural lifespan, and after that
they just start to suck. It's like Facebook was for
a while Facebook, Facebook just began to suck, and it
has sort of happens by degrees and everyone's like, oh,
what's going on, And then after a while you're like, man,
I just can't do this anymore. This is just beginning
to suck. And then you just you know, then you're
sort of how you feel of it, beref, but you
know what you're going to do. It sucks, you know,
it's just not that it's not it's not doing the
thing anymore. And I think there's a there was a
period from maybe twenty fifteen to twenty twenty four or
twenty five, a ten year period where Twitter was the thing.
Twitter now X, but it isn't anymore and I really
miss it. And there's in the course of in the
course of that arc, you know, subcultures have come and gone,
some some very influential ones. I mean, Donald Trump would
not be in the White House with that some of
those subcultures. You know, a great many other you know,
second and third order consequences have fallen out of that.
But the subculture that propelled Donald Trump to the White
House twice more or less emerged out of Twitter. I mean,
there are there are sort of subjects, or there are
subterranean channels that fed into Twitter channing. Yeah, there was
four channel and all a bunch of other bunch of
other little not so little either. There are other other
tributary rivets that fell into that, that fed into the
great stream of Twitter. But it was Twitter, really, yeah,
and that's that's over now in my you know. And
I couldn't even give you a couldn't even give you
a clear intellectual reason. It's just you feel it, you know.
It's Twitter is going the way, you know, the way
of all platforms, and I don't I don't know what
comes next. I don't even know if what comes next
is a written form at all, you know, it might
just be primarily short form video, which point I'm totally
stuck because I'm a creature of I'm a creature of text,
and I honestly don't know what happens to me at
that point. I sort of I'm a bit kind of
horrified by having even think about it. But I mean,
this is a this is a slightly kind of backwards
way of talking about, you know, the political subcultures that
have come and gone over the last ten years. But
I think the most the one in which I was
probably the most involved was was the Twitter counterculture, which
has which has you know, very much, very much taken
its place, you know, in the public sphere now and
as in the process, you know, as is always the
way with these things, have sort of lost its countercultural cachet.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: Most of the really funnier nons are now just like
there for their faces in the media.
Speaker 3: Yeah, which is hard sometimes to believe some of them,
I know, I know, you.
Speaker 1: Know so and some of those some of those people
have pol aidd into you know, quite quite influential, you know,
face posting media careers. And I mean I was, I mean,
I wasn't a on for a while, yeah, until between
twenty fifteen and twenty nineteen, maybe I was. I was
a non on Twitter. I wasn't. I wasn't like a frog.
I wasn't really part of that culture. But well no
I was. I wasn't on.
Speaker 2: That was just.
Speaker 1: A I mean that I have Now that's.
Speaker 3: We're probably on a hand, Like I'm fifty a year
forty five, right, and for me, the idea of being
an on is just I can't like I was never
really I think I did the beginning of the Internet.
Speaker 2: For a few years that was on on the like
Yahoo groups.
Speaker 3: This is a while ago, two thousand and two, two
thousand and three, actually like fighting dugan Nights, which like
really down and like down in the in the in
the let's say, the underculture of some of those Internet things.
But for a very long time, I'd always used my
name in my face. I don't know why, but it
just seems natural to do that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, when when you think about when you think about
English speaking Internet subcultures, functionally, what you're talking about is
the American uh in America led Internet Empire because you know,
English like, because of the de territorializing effect of the Internet,
all anglosphere Internet discourse is functionally the same thing, which means,
you know, effectively, no matter where you live, whether it's
I believe you're in Canada, is that right? And and
I'm in I'm in the British Isles, but we all
speak English, which means that you know, we just get,
we just get sort of you know, a daubed into
the American board because there's just more Americans, and they're
really loud, they have a lot of money, they have
like right right, you know, and I say this without rancor.
It's just it's just an effect of relative power and all,
you know, also being in the words of ten sixty
six and all that top notion, like it just is
what it is, right. So so so when I when
I think about when I think about the sort of
phases of Internet subculture that I've been an active participant in,
particularly since I stopped being a non it begins. It
begins with the Trump presidency in twenty sixteen. And that
was I mean, that was kind of chaotic, and I
wasn't really a commentator then, and I think my my
kind of you know, my face dooxing. I think, I
think they call it roughly coincided with the end of
the Trump presidency, the beginning of COVID, and the election
of Joe Bio.
Speaker 2: Okay, And there was I thought it there.
Speaker 1: It was twenty nineteen, I think kind of I stopped
being and early early in the lockdowns, I turned up
on an unheard video, at which point my place is
in the public domain and it's but then there was
this really for for somebody who likes, you know, for
a critic and like it's easy to be a critic,
and it's fun to be a critic, you know, there
was a very fruitful period where you know, there was
just lots to poke fun at. You know, there was
this very sort of oppressive, you know, climate of left
wing morals censoriousness, and there were just these crazy crackers policies,
you know, men pretending to be women, and there's all
sorts of crazy things going on, and there was just
there was just lots of like, there were a lot
of there was a lot of very low hanging fruit,
a lot of very easy targets, and a lot of
just you know, so so transfer transparently bonkers stuff. But
it was just it was just very fun and very easy.
And things are now very much more ambiguous, and I
feel like I don't like doing hot takes anymore because
things are just very often not what they see on
the first on the first take, and I'm I'm often
reluctant to go off off the cuff because you just
need a little bit more information. And also, you know,
at the risk of sounding paranoid, you know, the such
engines of propaganda as exist online are very much more
sophisticated now and very much more methodical and very much
more organized, and very much more effective. And it's just
like you can't I can't always see it, you know,
sometimes you can sort of smell it, you know. And
if but if you go off, if you go off
kind of half half cocked, then before you know, before
you you know, before your article has been up for
six hours, you realize you've been played. And that's just
a really annoying feeling.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think especially since the beginning, since the beginning
of the Ukraine War, then obviously the war in Gaza,
and now now it's like the propaganda is so it's
so precendent, so sophisticated, and so intense that that's why
one of the reason why I don't talk about politics
too much is that I honestly don't believe I know
what's going on now with Epstein the same the same problem.
Speaker 2: So it's very frustrating.
Speaker 3: Yeah, uh, you know, but that's also the problem of
the it's the problem of these these these algorithms that
we don't really know who who holds the key to
the algorithm, who gets things in front of you and
and doesn't.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so I've become I've become more
and more. Yeah, But ironically, the more the more high
profile I've become, the more reluctant. I've become to use that,
you know, as a sort of as a sort of
talking head on things which I'm not completely sure. I know,
I know what I'm talking, Yeah, I think. I mean,
it's also it's also just a really easy temptation to
fall into, you know, just sort of being being a
renter gob on anything and people, you know, people want
you to come on and spout about this all that
that you haven't you don't actually know very much about,
and you know, it's and it's easy to cobble together
some kind of an opinion, but you know, yeah, it
just feels it feels very chaotic and very confusing and
very very much more curated in a kind of, I
don't want to say a sinister way, but in a
very in a very intentional way. And I can't always
see I can't always see who's doing the curating and why.
And I think under those circumstances, just wiser to keep
it three quarters buttoned.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so what then, is exciting you? Like? What
is drawing your attention? What?
Speaker 3: What did you feel like it's worth getting engaged in
or talking about right now?
Speaker 1: I mean, I've finally I finally got the opportunity to
pursue a theme which has interested me pretty much since
pretty much since I left university or even before, which is,
you know, trying to find an answer to the question,
you know what, you know, if if the printing press
was revolution was, if if the printing press was was
really the engine that drove modernity, then what what does
it mean to go out the other side of print
and into this new thing? And I remember it struck
me very forcefully, pretty much, but it's pretty much the
moment I first met the Internet properly that that was
where we were. We were into the in the foothills
of something very new. And at the moment I'm writing
a book, ironically perhaps about about the end of the
print era and and and what it means, what what
what what it means to try and think after the
singularity or after the latest singularity?
Speaker 2: Mm hmm.
Speaker 1: I think it's my thesis is actually this is this
is the this is the third The second was the
printing press, and the first was the alphabet. So in fact,
we've we've merged with our information technologies before, you know,
and I guess this is a piece with you know,
not wanting to be a doomer about technology, or not
not being wanted, not wanting to be unambiguously a doomer
about technology. You know, this really isn't our first rodeo,
but the last one was pretty disruptive.
Speaker 2: In a lot of war came out of the printing press.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I mean, and you know, i'd like, you know,
what what what? What exactly has been happening since since?
You know, there's there's war in Ukraine, there's warring. Yeah,
there's war in Iran now as well. You know, there's
there's been some there's been some stuff. Yeah, there's there's
a certain amount of war. Is indeed, you know, I
don't know if it's a reach yet to draw any
sort of direct cause or lengths, but I suppose, I
suppose the links were quite indirect, you know, I mean.
Speaker 3: Everybody talk about multiplarity, you know, everybody's you talking about
it in different ways, whether and so this you know,
when you talk about the industrial process and this kind
of rational capacity to take words and make them into
a little bit that you move around, and you have
this this kind of top down control over what gets seen,
what gets published, what gets distributed, And this has been
the world we've lived in until let's say, the Internet,
even in terms of television, in terms of it was
all this very very direct monocultures that we were kind
of engaged with.
Speaker 1: Actually, I'd modify that very slightly in the sense that
I actually think the end of the industrial era proper
was the end of the Two World War was, you know,
because I mean if you think about you think about
the Two World Wars, you know, in a sense that
was the kind of it was the ultimate sort of
apotheosis in a really dark way of industrial manufacturing. Like
the whole you know, the every nation, every every country
that was that was drawn into that war ended up
conscripting basically their entire population into an extended, incredibly complicated
industrial process, all of which was geared towards killing the
other guy. That was just true everywhere, you know, for
every country. You know, it was either the home it
was either the war effort at home, or it was
munitions making, or it was digging for victory, or it
was or it was actually doing the fighting, and it
was all it was all industrialized, it was all highly mechanized,
and it was all geared towards killing the other guy.
And you know, the cataclysm was so total that people
were like, we're not doing that again, and and I don't.
I also don't think it's a coincidence that you come out,
you come out the other side of nineteen bush five
and you're in the era of TV and radio, which
are you know, Carl Schmidt noticed actually not long into
that era that this was already something new and it
wasn't really democratic in the in the classical sense at
all anymore. You know, in a sense it had degraded
the idea of of electorates to something more like something
more like entertainment. Democratic debate has sort of degraded to
something more like entertainment. So you have something of you know,
with in the TV and radio era, you have you know,
Marshall McLuhan in the nineteen sixties is on about how
he thinks electric simultaneity is already creating this sort of
post print consciousness which is very much more emotivistic tribal.
But the form of TV and radio is still one
to many, it's still very top down, and it's still
very centralized and controlled. So I think I think our
political forms maintained something that looked a lot like the
pre a lot like the industrial order for much longer
because because our media was still very centralized and and
that's just that's just you know, the the Internet just
threw a stone through that, and so now we have
electric simultanity. But you know, we no longer have the centralization,
and the results are just everywhere. They're there and people's consciousness,
they're they're in our politics, and they're there in our
in our individual relational lives as well. Yeah, and the
cracks and the cracks are just getting the discractle.
Speaker 3: Like all of the alliances are up in the air,
like nobody really knows exactly what alliances are anymore.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I mean, you know, people like to freak
out about cancel culture. I was thinking about this earlier today,
but I was thinking, what if, act, you know, what
if actually canceled culture was not a leftist thing at all,
But it's just an effect of the Internet and the
way the way people all like and it's it seems
to me that actually the never one assumed it was
a left wing thing is simply because leftist like the
left left wing communities got online sooner they were they
were earlier adopters of the Internet.
Speaker 2: Now that everybody because.
Speaker 3: The right wing people. They were the resistance at that
point in that culture. But now that things are not
as clear, we see all the cancel culture.
Speaker 2: Means, uh, you know, being applied on the right.
Speaker 3: I mean the way that you know, how people are
talking about Tucker, Candice all these people. It's like you
have to get rid of them, like they have to
stop speaking, and this is just and maybe it's just yeah.
So I think that you're right that it's mostly the
problem of everybody being able to say everything, you know,
and that that has effects.
Speaker 2: So people fall to ca.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it takes us incredibly, It takes this incredibly
feminine form because it is structurally a very feminine mode
of interaction in the sense I mean this this is
possibly this is possibly a sidebark. You know, people like
to go on about, you know, the feminization of everything,
and I always think that that's a that's an incomplete
analysis unless you're unless you're looking at it through the
lens of material conditions and technology as well.
Speaker 2: I mean, if you think.
Speaker 1: About the way the like classically, the different one of
the differences between men and women comes out in the
way they manage conflict, in that men are much more
likely to come to blows physically, but they're also much
more likely to form in groups and compete against out groups.
You know, this is this is the sort of evosych
story of men's sociality and conflict model, whereas women are
much more Women are much more on the surface conciliatory,
and they're much more cooperative, and they're much more collaborative,
you know, because the evolutionary pressures are different, and we're
also physically weaker. But what that that also produces a
different mode of conflict in that when when women fight,
it tends not to be so overt, you know, we
won't come to physical blows so often. And what and
what conflict tends to to look like more is covert
forms of hostility, you know, whispering campaigns, character reputation damaging,
whisper campaigns, character assassination, you know, ganging up on the other,
expelling somebody from from the in group. And if you
think about how the Internet works, you know, it incentivizes
endless talking and it forecloses physical violence just structurally, like
you know, obviously I don't want to hit you, but
even if I did want to hit you, you're you're
s of a thousand miles away in Canada. So what
I'm going to do? So so instead one of my
you know, I'm forced into this classically, you know, offline
at least much more feminine mode. You know, if I want,
if I wanted to, you know, come at you, which
you know, to be clear, I don't, but you know,
if I want to, if I want to come at
somebody on the Internet, I have to I have to
do it through characteristic characters, assassination and smear and whisper
campaigns and you know all and what you know when
when people say, when people say that woke and cancel
culture are are feminine and therefore obviously it's a it's
an effect of too many women in public life. They
have they have the causality completely. You're back, And actually
I think what we're looking at is a mode of
communication which forces everybody into these much more feminine modes,
even of hostility irrespective of sex, and then blaming it all.
Speaker 5: Online, which yeah, I mean, if if you've ever if
you've ever seen a bunch of right right wing male
and noons to a purity spiral, my god, it's like
a sixth form girls girls school common ram.
Speaker 1: You know, the the the the idea that this is
somehow uniquely a female. It's not. It's an effect of
the technology. Yeah, and perhaps perhaps that draws out, you know,
different aspects of our of our you know, sort of
sex natures in different ways. But the technology, the effect
of the the effect of the technology as a form
is incredibly powerful as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that's really interesting. Definitely there. I mean there's
probably a correlation between all of those aspects too. You know.
It's like, we don't have a lot of time, but
I want to ask you one last thing, which is
you know, you're you are going to speak with us
at s MARKROL summit, and your subject is very interesting.
So I would like you to give us like a
little so little taste or a little preview of what
it is that you want to talk about.
Speaker 1: I want to talk about I want to talk about
rebuilding the monasteries. And I actually don't know. I'm not
going to know until I prepare the talk. No, I know,
I know thematically, like what the zone is that I
don't want to but but I don't know yet how
to what extent I mean that literally and to what
extent I mean that figuratively. But but I want to
talk about I want to talk about the role that
the monastery is played after the Fall of Rome and
before before the modern in the in the middle bit
in if you're preserving and stewarding and keeping alive the
flame of intellectual and scholarly life within within European cultures,
which was it was absolutely essential. And I want to
talk about the relationship that that that that fostered between
the kind of things that the kind of knowledge that
was preserved and and the and the and the means
of preserving it, which I mean, which means I want
to talk about the rescralization of knowledge.
Speaker 2: And I don't know.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that necessarily has to be literal
or figured out. I don't know if you need to
actually live in a physical monastery to do that or not.
I mean, this is kind of an open question for me.
I also want to talk about practices of memory, which
is just a huge era of interest for me because
this because this was so central to medieval scholarly cultures.
Just because books were rare. You may you maybe only
got you'd get one go on a book in your lifetime,
and if you wanted to remember its contents, you really
had to remember it. And there were very methodical practices
that that entailed, which were extremely highly developed and were
just taught as a matter of course, you know, to
to anybody who was my table, stakes was remembered, was learning,
was learning the entire concance, you know, which is sort
of sort of inconceivable from from you know, five hundred
years into print culture and now digital one. And so
so I want to I want you know, what what
does it mean to what what does it mean to
to encode and transmit the material that we consider important
through practices of memory within within a context that sees
that sees the preservation and the transmission of knowledge as
inseparable from from U sacred life. And what does it
mean to have you know, what were the implications of
losing that you know very briefly? And then and then
what what does it mean to have come out the
other side of print culture to a point where we
were we're losing we're losing our paper based literary cultures
because everybody just scrolls now. But we have we haven't
yet we reclaimed practices of memories such as to such
as to be intentionally constructing interior. Uh what what they
would have called treasure houses. The thesaurus is a Latin
word for treasure house, you know, and it's given us.
It's given us our word for a printed dictionary of words.
But the interim stage between thesaurus is a physical treasure
house and thesaurus as a as a book containing verbal
definitions was a practice of memory, which which understood the
storing of important words and sentences and ideas as a
kind of storing up of treasure. And we don't have
that anymore, and I think we're going to need it,
you know, especially if AI is going to promise to
do all of our thinking for us and do all
of our writing for us. I mean, what does that
even leave us with? I would you know that? I
think the dangers are great, but there's it also opens
space for very much more intentional practice of memory, and
perhaps perhaps opens open space for a kind of recycualization
of knowledge. So that's I mean that that's kind of it,
I think, in a nutshell, but it I mean, if
you know, I've got some I've got a few chapters
to write between now and then, so it'll probably know
that's that's somewhere in that zone.
Speaker 2: I think that's wonderful.
Speaker 3: You know, it makes me think of really I keep
visiting Fedris again, you know, and socrates argument about writing
and how writing will will reduce memory, you know, because
it was kind of he was.
Speaker 1: Kind of a but as it turns out, he was
like he wasn't wrong. He was just two thousand years
out on his sunline.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well he wasn't wrong. But it's like he could
see a process starting that would end in what we
have now, which now no one can deny that. One
of the things that the Internet has done is that
it's completely externalized memory, and so you don't have to
actually have to remember anything, you just have to go
and get it online. And AI has made it even worse.
So I think that subject is is going to be
really interesting. I can't wait to hear what it is
that you have to say, and so so Mary, thanks,
thanks for talking to me, and I can't wait to
see you.
Speaker 1: It's too much treasure. I'm really looking forward to the
conference and thank you for having me.
Speaker 3: If you enjoy these videos and podcasts, please go to
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