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

“You had said was on the front page because otherwise it would disappear forever. And so you've got this survival of the fittest thing incredibly.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Platforms like Facebook that they could effectively grow. Upon so here the argument is something as follows. If you think about Achan and if you think about 4chan before it, they were basically meme factories. They were basically these. He also created these memes Desperately Sure, that”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I guess the question for me is the and again this is a wide open question. research, but what is the relationship Relationship in the broader ecology between companies like HCM And companies like Facebook. So I suspect that companies like HChan will be far, far less successful if there weren't billions. Much bigger”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Free speech. First of all, there is no universal standards. Secondly, even if there were universal standards, I don't think that we have the appropriate technical tools to be able to implement them when we've got companies that have billions of users and thousands or tens of thousands of employees.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, okay, well, but I guess the problem with Facebook is you look at the business model, there's just no way given Facebook's business model that it can credibly, even if you get away from the questions of political responsibility and who ought Facebook be responsible to, there's no very good way for it to successfully police a speech on its platform, given the tools that it has. Machine learning can do wonderful things, but machine learning, I think, simply is not going to ever be able to keep up with the multifarious ways in which human beings can use language in order to communicate nasty and unpleasant things to each other. So I guess the completely unsatisfactory answer I have to your question is, I just don't think that one can come up with a satisfactory solution either in political terms or in terms of effectiveness given the economy that we have at the moment to the problem of policing.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Economy, and I think that makes it really, really difficult for them to guarantee credibly to other market actors that they are not going to take advantage of the unique power, the unique access to information, access to ability to shape market conditions that they have. And even if they want to, it's going to be extremely difficult, I would imagine, for somebody like Jeff Bezos, when he's got all of these hungry young executives who are trying to make money and whose future depends on their ability to make money to stop them from pushing the envelope in waves that may undermine Amazon or Google's or indeed Facebook's market position over the longer run. So I think that this is much, much more general problem. And we know far less about the internal hierarchies of these companies and the internal political economies of these companies. And we ought to. But what we do know, and here I think Tim O'Reilly's recent book is quite good in this, gives us some reason to suspect that they...”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, well, we've seen multiple instances in the past where Facebook has proposed all of these arrangements by which there would be referendums of their users and so on and where it effectively began to renege on this once it became clear that this was inconvenient for Facebook's underlying business model. So the question is, I guess the question is, I think that this is going to work up to the point where there are serious implications for Facebook's business model. And past that point, Zuckerberg is going to have a very, very strong incentive to Rene. And I think that there's a more general problem if we think about platform economies that platform companies, I think, have become too powerful to commit to behave in good ways. So if you look, for example, at Amazon, if you look at Google, all of these are not only businesses, but they're also effectively microeconomies in their own right. They are both market players and they are the marketplace itself for key aspects of the information.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have to worry that the money is going to be confiscated. And this turns out, as people like John Brewer have discussed in their discussion of the British fiscal state of the 18th and 19th century, this turns out to be an enormous source of power projection. Now, the problem is, I think, that if you look at Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook at the moment, he does not have the power to tie his hands. So if you have this very, very strange corporate structure where Zuckerberg is effectively, he is CEO, he is in control of the board, he has the majority of the shares that count. And so this means, I think that it's very, very difficult for a Zuckerberg or anyone within Facebook to really credibly commit, to tie their own hands in this kind of way.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm very pessimistic. So, this is a piece that Margaret Levy, who has written on the theory of the state. And Tim O'Reilly and I wrote about 18 months ago, where we, more or less what we did was we took a standard set of arguments from political economy and in particular Norse and wine gas. So Nors and Weingast, I'm sure you're familiar with, and many of your listeners will be familiar with. They have this great article on tying the king's hands where they argued that the glorious revolution, this crucial moment in British history, why it was so incredibly important, was that it effectively allowed the monarch to make promises, so that previously monarchs had been able to borrow money and then renege on their deaths. Once parliament is instituted, the monarch can't do that nearly so easily anymore. And this weakness turns out to be an incredible source of power for the British crown over the next couple of centuries. It effectively allows it to borrow money and to borrow money freely because the lenders don't”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two sides, and which seems to me to be most compatible with a broad small L liberal understanding of the good life and the good society.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trying to think about. The other side of that, of course, is that unipolarity and the US willingness to use its power in order to crush all opposition has been used in a variety of problematic ways over the last few years. So sometimes I see myself I'm interested in trying to provide advice to businesses about how to push back against this. So Abe and I have a piece that is under editing at the moment for the Harvard Business Review where we are providing a sense for businesses as to what the landscape is that they're going to face. Sometimes I think that will be very good to see a big powerful government beginning to pursue the wholesale reform of the international financial system which I think has become problematic for democracy in a variety of ways and quite frankly which side of that debate I'm going to end up on over the longer term is going to depend on who the particular actors are on the particular on the”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, two twenty two p.m. are whether the month of the nor are in it. I guess that this is something that I've actually been struggling with and thinking about because there's another interesting aspect to this as well, which is if one thinks, for example, about a possible warrant administration, which I think is quite plausible at the moment as the most plausible candidate, perhaps at the moment on the Democratic side, although who the hell knows, then I think that what we're going to see is we're going to see the Warren administration trying to pursue a much more energetic foreign policy.”
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 value. But what you value? Yeah, well, let me put the trait off to you this way. I think if you value security, if the highlight that is on security, then the answer is you probably want to keep big companies around because you're going to want to pose broad standards. You're going to want to create collective security goods. And the only actors that can really do that in a substantial way are big businesses of one sort or another. If alternatively you value things like privacy and other kinds of rights, then I think you probably want to move towards a equilibrium in which there are far, far fewer big firms. So that's where I see the fiping played out. I see the fiping played out between people who value security and people who value privacy. I think they point in somewhat different directions.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Treasury Department OFAC sanctioned their PASCA but didn't realize that when it was sanctioning Derapaska's companies, it was going to mess up the entire West European car manufacturing industry, which relies upon specific aluminum products that only Derapaskas companies can create. So this led to this very, very complicated ballet dance in which the Treasury sought to both extend the sanctions and to specify them in ways that would allow for the unwinding at least the nominal unwinding of Derapaska's formal control of the company so as to create an exit strategy. But one can see that as we're going to have more and more countries trying to do this stuff and as they are doing so in a competitive way rather than one country trying as a unipolar power to impose it on everyone else that the possibilities of mistakes being made and mistakes leading to escalation and minor trade wars blowing up into”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Screwing up and things going wrong. And when one looks at how the US has done this over the last number of years, it has managed to prosecute its interests reasonably well while not pushing other countries too far until the Trump administration. That's not true anymore. And I think that as other countries come in, many of which are less sophisticated about thinking about what kinds of things they can or cannot do without messing up things for other countries or for their own companies. We're going to see far more mistakes being made. And this is especially true because nobody really understands what the networks are that they're trying to weaponize so that there was one very interesting example of this which happened with the United States in fact when it went after Oleg Derapaska who is one of the Russian oligarchs and Darapaska had a big interest he effectively had control of the Russian aluminum industry and so the US”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very, very good question. Okay, so I would say that what we're seeing at the moment is a transition from a world of one big nation, which is the United States, which has had to a very great degree a near monopoly on this stuff, to a series of group of nations, including the United States, but also including China, European Union, India perhaps, although people don't pay much attention to it. I wouldn't be interested to know much, much more about what India is doing in this space, and also Russia was Russia playing less as a significant power that is able to exert much influence than as a spoiler trying to figure out ways to screw things up for everybody else. So I think that we are moving from a world of unipolarity to use the standard term that international relations scholars use to a world of multipolarity. And one of the things that we can expect from that is that multipolarity tends to lead to a lot of danger of”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chief executive who effectively got ousted. I'm trying to remember the company, but I can think that this is, in a sense, if you want to outsource a lot of our decision making about culture, about the ways that things ought to be done to business, this is what you're going to expect for better or for worse.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Operate globally as having both great benefits and great weaknesses. If one wants to think about the standard story about how interdependence, at least under some circumstances, creates peace because businesses have an incentive to try and create peaceful and happy relations between nations in order to secure their commerce. I think that there's something to it, although as my work with Abe on weaponized interdependence suggests, there also are some clear limits to that as well. But the obverse of this is that business is obviously in the business of making profits and when there are clear political risks associated to business doing certain kinds of things, by and large businesses are not going to be especially courageous. And I think that this is particularly likely to be true of big firms, which I think are more likely to come under this kind of pressure. And once saw this already with regard to Hong Kong, there have been that airways.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, well, again, looking at this from my political science hat, this kind of stuff has been happening for a long, long time, but not so much to the United States. So there's a book by Blackwell and Harris, which came out with the Council on Foreign Relations a couple of years ago, which looks at how China has been imposing this kind of pressure against a variety of smaller countries, especially with respect to the Dalai Lama. And when China says jump, companies do tend to jump. And of course, we've seen Hollywood for the last number of years has been quite sensitive to the Chinese market, most recently as exemplified by the decision to remove the, I think it was the Taiwanese flag from the remake of Top Gun from the back of Tom Cruise's jacket because this was perceived as being possibly provocative. So I think that this is pretty standard stuff and that this tells us something about the way that business is operating. And here you can see the way that business”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not at all happy with what the European Union is doing in specific here, but I do think that there needs to be much greater regulation of platform companies. And in the absence of United States, I think that the European Union is the most plausible actor which has got the regulatory clout and the willingness to do so in a manner which is at least somewhat compatible with broad liberal norms. So my basic attitude would be to push back against a specific decision, but to say that if the choices between the United States not regulating or perhaps regulating, perhaps that will be different under a possible warrant administration, and authoritarian states, that I would much prefer to have a robust European Union than any of the other actors that I can think of that have the clout and the ability to try and bring the platform companies to heal.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A person, right? Okay, so let me back up and let me say two things. First of all, if I'm to think about this as a political scientist under my political science hat, what I would say is that this is something which is inevitable and this is something which we're going to see more and more of, which is that the internet for a long period there was a kind of an equilibrium in which United States managed to persuade everybody that self-regulation and platforms looking after their own business was more or less okay for most purposes. That equilibrium has broken down. It has broken down in the US it has broken down in Europe and it has broken down in authoritarian societies in particular. So I think we're going to see more and more efforts to try and use the platform companies effectively as means of extending reach into other jurisdictions and imposing universal type restrictions on what they can or cannot do. I want to think about this as an individual what I would say is that the”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That Europe doesn't like, that these are licenses to operate would be withdrawn. So that's the kind of circumstance under which I could see actual at the very least posturing happening at a very, very substantial scale between Europe and the United States and perhaps actual low level economic warfare if the US steps in to try to push back against Europe what Europe regards as being its core interests.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the EU at the moment, I think a lot of that policy debate is gearing up for perceived likely fights with the United States over the relationship between Europe and the Russian economy, because, of course, Europe depends much more heavily on Russia for energy and has a wide variety of other economic relations with Russia. And so I think that's the situation in which Europe would care much more substantially than the United States or would care as substantially as the United States and would be prepared to push back hard. So those are the circumstances under which there has been a recent paper by the European Council on Foreign Relations, which has talked about ways in which Europe could deter United States actions. And one of the actions that is proposed there is that the European Union think about licensing requirements for U.S. firms that want to operate in Europe, such that if they cooperate with sanctions against European”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While the way I would push back against that a bit is to not assume what you're assuming, which is to say that under many circumstances it is going to be true that the United States is going to care about this stuff much more than the European Union is. And Iran, I think, is a great case of that. The EU trade with Iran, it's not insignificant, but it isn't anything enormous either. But there are other things which Europe is much, much more worried about. And in particular, what they are worried about is Russia. So I think that the counter example to what you say is assume, for example, that we have a 2020 election in which Donald Trump is ignominiously defeated what we are going to see then plausibly is a situation where a presidency and a Congress, even if the Republicans still have the majority in the Senate, they're going to be loaded for bear. They're going to go after Russia with sanctions of one sort or another. Many of those sanctions are plausibly going to implicate the European Union. And so when one looks at the policy department,”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They probably are going to have to buy into much, much heavier regulatory clout at the EU level, including the kinds of things that could be used to bring SWIFT to heel.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where the United States tells it to do one thing, and Europe tells it to do another, that SWIFT would effectively have much stronger reasons than it does at the moment to comply with the European threats. Now, the problem with that from Europe's point of view is that that involves creating a much, much heavier institutional paraphernalia at the EU level, which is going to be something that is going to be problematic for a number of the member states who don't like to see the European Commission and European institutions taking up that level of power. But at the same time, there is, I think, a much, much clearer case being made. And if one looks, for example, at the comments that have been made in the run-up to the new commission, it's very, very clear from Joseph Barrell and other people that they are looking to really create the European Union as an economic power in a way that hasn't been true in the past. And to the extent that member states begin to buy into that kind of agenda,”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a very good and very interesting question because Swift is as it stands at the moment is nominally a European organization. It is a nonprofit organization, a nonprofit consortium which is based in Belgium. So there are ways in which I think if the European Union were to get serious in this, it would probably be less about trying to create an alternative system to SWIFT than trying to bring SWIFT more under its own command. So at the moment SWIFT is nominally European, but in fact has a lot of influence from the United States. The United States has provided many of its senior decision makers including people like Lenny Schrank and it has also provided a large number of board members. So the European path forward I think if Europe wanted to try and minimize its exposure would be to start to impose a much clearer and more substantial mandate upon SWIFT to effectively force SWIFT under circumstances”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that at the end of the day the balance between that and having cheap telecommunications infrastructure is such that they're willing to allow Hawaii to provide at least some parts of the machineries that they are looking to have subcontracted out.”
2019-10-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source