YouSaid · the spoken record

Henry Farrell

lines on the record: 78
first: 2019-10-23
most recent: 2019-10-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“More broadly in the world which are derived from people like Hayek. We have this set of arguments which are beautifully expressed and which I think are very important arguments that Hayek makes about how markets work extraordinarily well to gather all of this diffuse information, this information which is simply unencodable and to make it into something that can be useful.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and the world is maybe cooperating too much. Myself, my co-author are finding ourselves, we joke that we're on a treadmill because stuff keeps on happening. People keep on asking us to write stuff. And it's fun and it's exciting. And it's wonderful to see your ideas go out there into the world, but it also requires a lot of work to keep pedaling. And also, and I think this is the plausible fate of anybody who has idea that takes off, you see the idea effectively escaping your control. So people are talking about weaponized interdependence with respect to a much wider and broader and diffuse range of phenomena than what we talked about. And that's just the way that these things work. Second thing that I'm interested in is the informational content of democracy. So here maybe the intuition is something like the following. So we have a standard set of arguments that have been extremely influential among libertarians. And I think”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, what I'm really interested in at the moment, two things. First of all, the weaponize interdependence work, which we've talked about already, so it probably doesn't bear much more talking about.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, so effective, you know, you can think about it as a evolutionary dynamic that this is a system in which it becomes, you know, you throw out variations. Most of those variations fail. Some of those variations take root and then those variations can succeed far, far better.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think what do I do that's unusual? I would say I read widely and I play with a lot of ideas, most of which don't come to fruition. So, and again, this is one of the advantages of social media, that you can toy with an idea, you can turn it into a micro thread of three or four things on Twitter, and you can throw it out into the world, and you can see if it sticks, you can see if it grabs attention. You can also see if you've worked it out to your own satisfaction. And most of the time, that's not going to work. Most of our intellectual products are failures, but we live in a world where it's possible to throw these failures at a far, far more rapid rate at other people and try to figure out what works than in the past. And so I found that to be an extremely useful way of thinking through things and playing with initial ideas.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Debate than there was back then. So, in a sense, we came into being at a moment when I think that a lot of the energy of the left had run out. So you had places like dissent and other places which were really running on the accumulated energy of the 1960s and 1970s, but which weren't particularly strongly, they weren't oriented towards the present day circumstances that they found themselves in. Now I think we're in a very different world where there just isn't as much need for crooked timber as there used to be because there are so many other places where people can write, where people can argue, where people can find things to say. And I think it's a very interesting intellectual phenomenon. And you have a vibrant left, which is also beginning to engage with the policy process, I think, again, in a way that it hasn't for a long, long time.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think that crooked timber, I think that we had a useful catalyst function. I think that if you look at the world today, that there are a lot of people who are able to do the things that we were able to do in different mediums. So if you look at the world that we began writing in, this was the world where the Iraq war was beginning. I think we started writing just around the time that the Iraq war took off, in which there wasn't much of an organized left and a coherent and systematic intellectual left in the United States. There was more of one in the United Kingdom. And so I think that in a sense, that isn't true anymore. If you look at the left, you may disagree or you may agree with what it says, but there's a lot of thriving debate. There is a lot of argument. There are a whole bunch of journals, schisms, factions, all of these things. So much more lively, much more thriving intellectual.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that morning the following morning, I saw Brian in the car parking university college Dublin, and I saw him in absolute glee saying the bastards, they've lost finally the bastards have lost. And he was right because at that moment the stranglehold, which a certain version of conservatism had held on Ireland, it began to evaporate very, very quickly. And after that, I think that having the church as a centre of society, as a centre of all these social functions, all of these things began to disappear. Material prosperity helped substantially as well. But I really think that the reason why it happened so fast was because it should have happened 20 or 25 years before, and it took a shock to the system to really cause this kind of this cascade of norm degeneration so that people switched rapidly from one equilibrium to another.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that it's what's his name, Timur Kuran. I think that this is a Timur Kuran story where you have this set of beliefs and expectations which are mutually reinforcing because everybody believes that everybody else believes them, and that when this collapses, the collapse can happen very, very quickly indeed. So I think we saw a massive wave of preference revelation happening. And it's pretty possible to pinpoint the point at which it happened. One of my professors was a character called Brian Farrell, who was very well known for being quite careful and reticent because he was also a television broadcaster. He ran the big Ireland current affairs show. And then one day we had the revelation that a bishop who had become the spokesperson for the Irish church had been found to have had a child and have been supporting that child for 17 years using church funds.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you have the economic wherewithal to do it, that makes Ireland in some ways a much more confining, a much more restrictive way place than the United States, again, assuming that you have enough money in the United States to be able to realize yourself.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I miss is also what I'm happy to get away from, which is the sense of comfort and belonging. So Ireland is a very small country. Within 60 seconds of having met another Irish person, you probably have figured out who that person's family are, where they come from. You will have made a wide variety of inferences about what kind of person they are, what their plausible political beliefs are, and so on. And that's very, very comforting to be in. It's also somewhat constraining and constricting. So what I love about the United States is the precise opposite that nobody much cares about where you come from, where you come from. If they think about Ireland at all, they think about it as being a small, quaint place with leprechauns and greenfields.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way in which somebody like Donald Trump seems to dominate in very unhealthy ways are collective imaginations so that it's almost impossible to get away from. I really think about one of the kinds of psychic predators that Wolf describes, Jory Graham, I think it is, if my memory is correct, in Yubic. There's this kind of very, very, the sense of the world in which all of these paths converge towards a single actor who just gobbles up all of our attention. Dick doesn't have any very plausible way of getting out from that. So if he suggests more or less that we need some kind of divine intervention, but I think it captures some of the reasons why the world that we live in very often feels so unpleasant, even when we don't want to pay attention to Donald Trump in the United States. We find everybody around us wants to pay attention to Donald Trump and Trump, if nothing else, seems to have a unique mastery.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the best of his creations, if you want to think of the best as a novel, I think is the transmigration of Timothy Archer, which I think is plausibly the only genuinely good novel that he wrote and also is the only novel that has a sympathetic and interesting female character in it. But it's not his most important work. I mean, I think it's good at showing that towards the end he managed to get some kind of a sense of himself from outside and of perspective on his struggles with mental health, which clearly were both a driving creative force for him and a source of much personal agony and destruction. I think that the works that are most important, I think, are Ubik and Martian time slip. Both of these, I think, capture, these are the most quintessential Dick novels about how it is that reality can break up and what it feels like to be in that kind of world. So if I think again about the kinds of, you know, what I feel depressed about.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which I think is really why Dick, much more than, say, Orwell or Huxley or any of the other people you might think of Zamiatin, is really the person who captures the kind of dystopian characteristics of the society that we live in at the moment, which isn't a society where we have a stage telling everybody what to think, but it's a world in which nobody knows quite what to believe is true anymore, and you have multiple different versions of the truth. Philip K. Dick would have just reveled in QAnon. I think he would have had a very, very good sense of how it is that we could end up in a world with people like Donald Trump and QAnon reinforcing each other in a kind of a feedback loop.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that Dix's understanding of politics is at least his intellectual understanding of politics is not his strength. So he clearly he's got this very strong paranoid streak. Everything is about Richard Nixon, which I suppose is not unreasonable given the way that the world is. What I think Dick gets much, much better than his sense of politics as such are, for that matter, than his sense of character, because he is absolutely terrible in character, especially when it comes to women characters, his women characters are all expressions of Dick's own personal anxieties in one way or another. What he gets better is the sense of massive complex systems that don't work particularly well. The kinds of constraints that they impose upon individuals and the kinds of ways that people try to respond to those constraints. And also, of course, the sense of profound unreality in Israel.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very, very interesting. There's this beautiful image, one of my favorite images from the book of the New Son, is of the famous picture that was taken, was it not by Armstrong himself, but of Armstrong in his helmet on the moon with Neil Armstrong, with the flag in the background and the reflection of the other astronaut. And so Wolf has this and has it as a, you know, this is a picture which has been preserved for thousands of years perhaps in this art gallery, which is maintained in this forgotten citadel. And so he gives you this wonderful sense of what it would be to have an image like that taken and ripped entirely out of context and seen through an entirely alien set of eyes. And that's what science fiction does when it does it well, is to make the strange, familiar and the familiar strange in the novala sense of the word. And I think that's why for me Wolf is a head.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the great problems of Proust is what is happening on the social level, that you have all of these aristocratic understandings, the Merovingian, all of these histories, all of these castles, all of this wonderful art, and they are being replaced by the modern world with its telephones, with its electric lighting and so on. And how do you think about this? How do you try to preserve what is happening in the past? And what Wolf does, which I think is an extraordinarily interesting thing, which I think would be impossible for anybody who's not a science fiction writer, is to take that and reverse this and to imagine a world in which modernity has disappeared, so it is at the other end of the telescope. It is this tiny image which is barely discernible if you look through the telescope the wrong way. It has been surrounded and replaced and to some extent supplemented by medieval ways of thinking, medieval ways of organizing the world. And what that looked like.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. Wolf misleads us systematically. And clearly Severian is not a reliable narrator, but then neither is Proust's narrator either. And I think that if you really want to understand where Wolf comes from, it really is Proust. His writing style is Proustian. His concern with time, with how it is that time works is quintessentially Proustian. And you don't look to Wolf any more than you look to other science fiction, I think, for characterization. I don't think that's the particular strengths. What you do look is for a kind of a sense of the world. And I think in Wolf in particular, if he provides this real understanding of how it is that the workings of society, and interestingly, conservative understanding of the workings of society. And so I think of him almost as being Proust in reverse. So Proust is describing a world in which the modern world is overtaking aristocracy. And that clearly is...”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would summarize it as Proust with Rock Chipsons and Ray Guns. To summarize, wealth, wealth is proof with rockets and ray guns.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it depends on what you say. I could bore you for hours about how I think that institutions work. But if you want to, I guess, get the feral sense of the social production function, it's something like the following that you need rough levels of economic inequality, which allow for institutions which are reasonably fair, which in turn create the conditions for social trust.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I tend to think about trust in terms of institutions. So there are different people who have different takes on this. Some people talk about trust in terms of this kind of socially, this broad social sense of optimism or happiness and things. I tend to think that if you want to have trust, you need to have well-functioning institutions which...”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“which presumably is a good thing for markets and for capital than having something like labor unions as necessary. And I think that the way that Nscannon has moved, and in particular the way that people like Brink Lindsay together with Steve Tellis, have moved towards endorsement, albeit with a certain amount of grudgery, of labour unions, really points to the realization by smart people on the center-right and on the libertarian tinged centre-right, that this is something that maybe libertarians have gotten wrong over the last couple of decades.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think labor unions are going to replace labor unions. So I think that we're going to have, now, that said, this is a kind of a long-term bet, which could, of course, turn out to be completely wrong. But I think that it's more or less impossible to imagine a world in which you have protection for large segments of the population that doesn't roughly resemble labor unions. Now, this may be very, very different, just as the platform economy involves a greater degree of disaggregation and standard work practices. One could imagine that we're going to have to see labor unions being very, very different in form. But I think that they're important. And it's also very interesting to see people like Asamoklu and Robinson making a very important political case for labor unions saying that if you're an economist, you can't think about labor unions as being a first best solution because clearly they're about distribution and distribution of stuff to their members. But if you're thinking about maintaining the underlying conditions for democracy,”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How to create a better society is really going to force us to look at this much more specifically than a Palanian framework would allow us to do.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“vague and wafty in Plany is how it is that quotes society reacts against the market, reacts against these depredations of the marketplace, this double movement that he talks about. Personally, I tend not to believe in big abstractions such as society as explanations or social causes. So I think that he captures something real. And I think if you want alternatively to say what Polanyi gets right, I think that there is something that can be said very plausibly about the ways in which many of the aspects of Trump are alternatively of what we see happening with people like Orban and Kaksinski in Central and Eastern Europe that these can be explained as being reactions against overly harsh market forces of one sort or another. But the specific micro-mechanics through which this happens are really, really important. And we still haven't really figured out what those micro mechanics are. And I think trying to figure out...”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As many flaws, so I think it's a really, I think it's a really interesting good book that everybody ought to read. I also think that people ought to read Schumpeter. I think is the book on the right that people need to, the capitalism, social democracy book. But what I would say that Polanyi is a very, very, well, there are two things that are fuzzy in it. First of all is his ideal alternative, which is based, I think, in a kind of notion, a specifically Christian notion of socialism that I think he derives from people like Tawney, which I think is very, very hard to create in the modern era. So I think that there's a lot of pretty overt nostalgia for a previous, almost quasi-medieval sense of organic connection between society and economy, which I think simply cannot be re-established under liberal conditions. And the other thing that, of course, is very, very...”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Various financial activities in regulating platform economies, and it has also been relatively willing to facilitate some very exotic tax arrangements. I think that the former of these still continues, and I think has managed to kick start a genuine native industry, which I think will continue to do very well. I think that the latter part, the taxation game, is coming to an end. It's very clear that it's coming to an end. People in the central bank have been making statements about it, more or less warning the government that the fiscal implications to a cessation of Ireland's ability to finesse the global tax system. This is coming to an end, and the Irish state is suddenly going to have a fiscal headache as a result, which added to a possible Brexit headache could have some pretty significant implications.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say that there is a certain amount of neoliberalism in there, but maybe not in the quite the sense that you suggest. Well, okay, well, there are two things. First of all, I would say, insofar as there is anybody who's identified with neoliberalism in Ireland, it is another family member who is an uncle who is the Deputy Prime Minister of Ireland, Michael McDoole, who I'm very fond of and who I have strong political disagreements with. But I think that if one is to look at neoliberalism as a kind of a global power structure plausibly Ireland managed to figure out very creatively, very ingeniously ways to fit into that power structure that allowed for massive n-word investment. So here specifically, I think a lot of what Ireland has done over the last number of years is to figure out a combination of a regulatory play and a taxation play. So it has been a relatively lax place in regulating”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To appear as a drunk windbag in the ALO's chapter. Was he a drunk windbag? He was an interesting character. So his real name was Hugh McNeill. So he appears as Professor McHugh in the Aeolis chapter. He comes in, he makes various remarks about Greeks and Dromans and the comparison to the Irish and the British more or less insinuating that the Greeks like the Irish are great liars, thieves, tellers of stories, and the Romans and the British are great builders of sewer systems. And he was a lecturer in classics, as I recall, at the predecessor to University College Dublin, had problems with gambling, had problems with alcohol, and ended up Being alienated from his family and dying alone in a boarding house decades after. So a rather sad story.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think that for me the track on the end of Loveless soon is, I think, one of the most sublime achievements. I'm also very fond of Kevin Shield's MBV orchestra mix of the primal scream song if they move Killim. I think that was released. It was released first of all as a B-side and then as their next album, I think it's like this kind of this crazy Sunra meets all sorts of strange guitar distortion music. I think it's very, very good. I think that they really are one of the essential groups and that album which they released three or four years ago I don't think was quite as good as they released back in their heyday, but it was still pretty damn good compared to what most of their contemporaries are doing.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think this is something that we will agree. I don't think it is possible to underrate or to overrate other my bloody Valentine. They're just incredible.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The interesting question, I think, is to what extent is the Chinese state kind of like Italy writ large? So you can see the same kinds of problems with this massive bloated state sector in China, these big companies which are closely and intimately related with the state. You have these small private companies which have been incredibly powerful, incredibly dynamic, incredibly successful. I wonder whether China may suffer from a version of the Italian disease two or three decades from now and perhaps even more starkly because of the lack of democracy because it really I think is only possible to maintain that private dynamism for a period of time while the public economy doesn't provide for the appropriate public goods sooner or later I think it just becomes impossible to maintain.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a really good question. So the standard story of Italy, according to people like Carlo Trudiglia, was that it was public weakness and private strength. So more or less the idea was that you had this ridiculously over-elabrated state structure, regulations which made it extremely hard to get things done. And you had this incredibly dynamic private sector that managed to survive and to thrive despite this and to produce two markets elsewhere. Now the question is, I think for Italy that its big strength was in manufacturing. It was not in computer science. So or in any of the new data related economy. And so I think Italy's problem is that it is more than anything else it is stuck in a previous cycle and it is except in certain areas such as luxury eyewear which are not going to power an economy. It has a very it's going to have a very great difficulty in clamoring out.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've not been there in about 20 odd years. So my sense is that the kinds of manufacturing community that I studied back then is still surviving, but I don't think it's thriving in nearly the same way. But I really don't know enough to say I've not been survived.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, somebody else who I think is underrated in this context is Mankar Olson. And so, for example, I think if you want to understand where Elizabeth Warren is going, I think you want to go back to Mankro Olson's book on The Rise and Decline of Nations, because I think what Elizabeth Warren is pursuing is very much an Olsonian view of how markets work that drag and Dross and corruption builds up, and that in order to allow markets to achieve their full potential, you need to basically need to cleanse them at a certain point. So I see Warren as being somebody who has very much taken on the law and economics training. And you see, I think, big marks of that in her thinking, but who has turned it in a very different ideological direction.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An Marxism, I think, is, well, I think it's underrated. I think it's going to come back. Now, when I say analytic Marxism, let me be specific about that. I think that there's a lot of Marx, which I think is flat out wrong. And the analytic Marxist project itself, I think, drove itself into a hole if you look at people like Elster, the other people who are strongly committed to it. I think that they eventually ended up figuring out that there wasn't If you wanted to make sense of Marx, you're going to come to the conclusion that eventually there wasn't much point, there wasn't much sense to be made of it. But nonetheless, I think the basic underlying idea, which is that if you bring together rationalist perspectives with a direct concern with power relations and a desire to understand power relations in the Marxist and the Weberian way, that this is something which is coming to the fore again, and I think which is something which is extremely valuable.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think overrated So I think that Bitcoin, if you think about Bitcoin, it purports to be a technological hack. It's really, I think, an effort at a sociological hack. And I don't think it's particularly worked. I think that we're going to see the underlying technologies being adopted to the extent that they are useful for better financial services. But I think that the ideology of Bitcoin, the idea that you could effectively like some kind of, like the villain and rapunzel that you could create this machine for sowing value out of rubbish, so basically because that's what Bitcoin is. It's turning wasted computer cycles into something that people view as being a thing of value. I think that it succeeded among a significant enough community that it's going to survive and be around for a while. I don't think it's ever going to take off beyond that community.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And over time maybe I've mellowed I've become much nicer, I value. As a result, I found it a much, much more pleasant experience to get to know people and not feel that when they say something that you think is idiotic or reprehensible, that you necessarily have to argue with them because maybe tomorrow or the next day they'll say something that's more interesting and that brings you back into a feeling of communion wisdom.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that a lot of it also has to do with the former Twitter that it was 140 characters and then 280 characters. There has been some research. Suggests that the increase in the character limit has actually had consequences for perceptions of real argument happening. As opposed to people just setting out stances, So Think that there is certainly something to be said for the increased dogmatism, that is, when you see the other side and what the other side actually says, that there can be a tendency towards polarization. But I also see a lot of very interesting conversations happening on Twitter that That I would never have been exposed to before.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Donald Trump has had, I think, some very, very substantial consequences for Debate. I don't follow many people who are followers of Donald Trump, and I follow them more or less in a Or less a clinical way Than a these are people who are going to have interesting and unexpected things to say to me kind of way. So I wonder whether or not that perception is much more a result of the fact that if you are a certain kind of libertarian, the people who you want to talk to are going to be far more on the left side of the aisle right now than they would have been five or six years ago.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And maybe, you know, I wonder again There's research on this. And if there's not research, I wonder to what extent this perception is a function of the if it's just perception rather than reality to what extent is it perception the results of the trunk Of a big chunk of the right out of the conversation. Because if you think about the conversation that we're involved in, It's a conversation which you might call small Liberal, that is people who On either side of the aisle, but who are plausibly committed to a kind of pauper, Of thinking about the world in which you want to have debate on both sides of the aisle because this is how you advance. Argument, advance your understanding of society. But on the right side of that, there has been a truncation where a lot of people, I think, have peeled off.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“NLP or something similar I haven't seen that research. But to the extent that it is true Think that If one wanted to come up with a kind of a Half-baked social science theory which might or might not be correct, it might be because the valences of the service are much more abundant. Quasi solidaristic about creating affirmations of shared values, of shared communities. In ways that plausibly But then argue against myself, so I would immediately think, well, the same thing ought to be true of a variety. Of conservative communities When I look at my Twitter, my Twitter is certainly much more left-wing, but that is also mine. Yeah, that's a function.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The surface. So, first thing, I'm taking the statement on face because I actually haven't seen any research on this. There must be somebody whose research. Left ring versus right wing views on”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That this discussion is going to be dominated by the security side of the House, but to the extent that privacy advocates Privacy officials are able to get into this debate as well. I think that one could plausibly come up with something which is... Is going to be Respectful of civil liberties.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That really implement this properly, we're going to have to see the creation of some kind of a system Probably among us Industrial democracies in Western Europe. United States, Japan Number of other countries There is a sum set of Standards and shared agreements Beginning to see the”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Security community And so, my understanding is that FISA is still perhaps From a Civil Liberties perspective, but it is far, far less problematic than it used to be. So I think that it is possible to do this kind of stuff. It takes careful institutional design.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That has changed to some degree. So if you look at FISA now, FISA is a very, very different beast than it was in the past. And more or less the problem with FISA, as I understand it, was that effective as a court. Only one side was able to present its And now you have effective public advocates. You have a number of people who. advocates Public interest and who are read into the secrecy surrounding”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, I'm actually A lot of friends who aren't on the other side of this. I think that it is okay to have this as long as there And I think that is a question.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That the likelihood And becoming epidemic. Across unity of internet users. Will be far, far less. Obviously, we would have other problems then, but I think that the problems that we would face would be a very, very Problems that we face in the current.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Space, but you need two things for that to work. Of all, you need Secondly Some kind of For these memes to propagate So I suspect that if we were in a world. Everything was The scale of Having a mixture of companies Of Achan and companies at the scale of Facebook”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source